Overclocking is a big deal these days. I can remember when it was just a bunch of crazed guys with too much money and free time on their hands. We used to do things like solder new resistors onto CPUs (the Slot A Athlons), swap out caps and resistors on motherboards to get more voltage through the boards and to the CPU. I vividly remember building water cooling kits with pool pumps and tubing bought from Home Depot. Once I even pulled a radiator from a Coke vending machine (old and broken) for a rig I was building. Well thankfully those days are over (but it would still be fun to do some of this). Motherboard makers are now designing and building motherboards with top of the line components voltage regulation systems and tracing that is laid out for business. Many have world class overclockers that work for them to get the most performance out of each and every motherboard. Every now and then they get to build something special from the ground up. We are taking a look at one of these boards that has been built for speed. The one we have in-house was designed by HiCookie; the resident overclocker at Gigabyte. This is the X58A-OC (the OC is for Overclocking as if you could not guess).
Value -Value is another very subjective topic. What is expensive to some might be a deal to others. You can look at this topic in multiple ways. One is raw price and the other is what you get for the money. Each is accurate and both are correct ways to look at price/value. We tend to look at features, performance and real-property when we discuss value. However, we also take into account the raw cash cost of the item.The X58A-OC will set you back about $380 this puts it in the same price range as most top-end gaming or overclocking boards (and much less than the older X58A-UD9). Now, for most this will seem like a lot of money and well, it is. However, this price is only ridiculous to someone that does not need the features that the X58A-OC has to offer. It is nothing that I have not said before; if you are interested in browsing the web or some simple productivity work then this is not the board for you and the price will not make sense. For those of you that are looking to break out the LN (Liquid Nitrogen) and your copper pots then this the X58A-OC will make sense and the price won’t be that big of a deal. In fact it is something of a bargain. Conclusion -The X58A-OC looks like a great board on paper. There are some great design choices and excellent workmanship. The only issues we see right now are with the shipping BIOS; we have a feeling that many of the issues that we saw will be ironed out very quickly. Still even with the SSD and ACHI mode problem we had we have a feeling that with the right cooling (ours is still simple liquid), memory and of course CPU and you will get some simply amazing clocks on this. Right now our roadblock is our cooling for certain. We could not get anywhere near the 1200 Watts to the CPU as we would have liked. Our cooling would just not keep up. We are actively looking into better cooling for this board so that we can show off what it can really do when pushed. We are also planning on re-visiting the X58A-OC with the next BIOS version released to see if Gigabyte has fixed the one issue we ran into. To wrap things up, we can and will recommend the X58A-OC for any overclocker looking for their next board. The reasons are pretty simple, even with the SSD issue you can get some good clocks with the right gear, and you are really not going to find an overclocking board that is this stripped down from anyone else on the market (at least not yet).
