 Now these days you'd be hard-pressed to find a Gigabyte motherboard that is not advertised as overclockable and with overclocking features. However, the X58A-OC is the first board they've released that is pretty much strictly for overclocking. So they have their Gamer series, which is the G1 series, so you've got the Assassin, the Sniper, and the Gorilla. And then this is the OC series. So it might not have some of the features that gamers might like, such as the third-party chips for LAN as well as audio, but what it does have is a ground-up design, not like ground-up like, I like this, but from the ground level up to the top, designed for overclocking. So this is an X58 board, which means it supports Intel Core i7 processors on LGA 1366. Here we will find, okay, a little OC shield, not much on that side, not much over here. Don't forget that does include Core i7 Extreme 6-core processors. Now on the back, we will find a ton of different features and whatnots that Gigabyte has to say. So before this board was released, actually the long-standing X58 tradition of overclocking had been turned on its ear because they were able to achieve a previously unheard of, that is a world record, overclock on this board in spite of the fact that this platform has been around since pretty much forever. It's been like a couple years now. So there's been a lot of time for overclockers and the engineers at the motherboard companies to get familiar with the platform and even so, Gigabyte has managed to release a board that outperformed everything else when we're talking strictly overclocking. So here we have a Crossfire Bridge, here we have an SLI Bridge, here we have a 3-way SLI Bridge because if you're an extreme overclocker who's going to be using a board like this, you probably will need one. Okay, we've got two SATA 6 gigabit, rather, they'll run on SATA 6 gigabit per second, but this is not their SATA 6 part number. So two right angle SATA cables, two straight SATA cables, we have a rear I.O. shield. Now check that out, there's almost no stuff coming out of the back of the board because this is in some ways a bare bones board that is designed, as I said, for one purpose only. You've got voltage check readouts here, so you can use these to use a multimeter to manually check the voltages to various parts of the system. Very important, especially if you're doing any V-modding, Gigabyte sticker for the front of your test bench in all likelihood because this won't go in a case. We've got a Gigabyte utility DVD as well as a user's manual, although if you're buying this board you probably don't need a user's manual. All right, let's close this up and have a look at the board itself. Now it's been quite a while since I've seen a board with as appealing an aesthetic scheme as the X58AOC. This is by far the best looking board I've seen probably since, I'd say since DFIs socket 478 stuff because I love the orange and black Halloween color scheme. It's really easy to find UV orange stuff to go with it, whether it's fans or water cooling or whatever the case may be. So if you were going to use this in a real daily driver machine versus just strictly for overclocking competition, it would look so cool. So anyway, I'm done gushing now. So let's go ahead and have a look at the overall layout of the board and then we'll talk about some of the special features. So let's start with the CPU socket. This is a Lotz socket, so you're not going to have any of those burn problems that were experienced with some of the Foxconn sockets. Just a little thing, do care and attention being paid to the target market for this board. We have, here, actually I'm going to cheat. I'm going to look at the backboard. So Gigabyte claims output from the CPU socket is up to 1200 watts. Now if you managed to make a CPU consume 1200 watts, then you're some kind of wizard. But the point is that this board is completely overbuilt. So they're using driver MOSFETs, their chokes are rated, single chokes are rated up to 50 amps. Okay, it's, let me see. Okay, the PWM frequency goes up to 1000 hertz. Excellent. You've got two 8-pin EPS power connectors. Okay, so these are up here and they're at ideal location along the top left edge of the board. And actually, give me one moment here. Also of note is the fact that the CPU socket area is extremely clutter free. So this makes insulating around the CPU much easier when you're using liquid nitrogen or dry ice cooling or any other exotic cooling methods to cool the CPU itself. Because you don't want that condensation ending up on the board any more than is absolutely necessary. Okay, so we've got support for triple channel DDR3 memory. You can see all those slots here. I'm actually gonna get into what all of this area is for a little bit later. But we've got our 24-pin ATX power connector exactly where it belongs along the right hand edge. We have, here we go, six SATA 2 3 gigabit per second ports and two SATA 3 6 gigabit per second ports. And I'll get into what these are for in a little bit as well. We have all of our front panel connectors here. We have our front USB including on off charge. So that means you can charge your devices even when the system is powered off. They're claiming up to 40% faster as well, which is very nice. There's your front audio. Okay. We don't see anything special in terms of the audio chips being used or the LAN chips being used. It looks like just real tech chips. So nothing special there. As I mentioned before, this is not for that. This is for overclocking. Serious business. So we have dual graphics support in 16x 16x mode or quad graphics support in 8x 8x 8x mode. So there are no additional chips. That means no NF 200 chips, no Lucid Hydrologics chips, nothing like that. This is in order to make sure that there's as little latency as possible. It's yet to be proven in any meaningful way that those additional chips and the bandwidth they provide are able to improve benchmark score. So that's why they have opted to not include those on this board. We have one PCI slot. So if you need one, you have one. And then moving right along, we have an extremely beefy cooling solution for the Northbridge as well as for the power delivery system. It's also LED lit. So you can see the power cables here and here. So these strips right here are actually going to light up. And this one right here actually lights up. So the board should look really cool when it's powered on. But that's just an aesthetic thing. So what I'm talking about here is just the fact that these have very, very beefy aluminum heat sinks that's going to give you a lot of room for heat dissipation. Although some of the more extreme overclockers may even just remove the whole whack and put a pot on the Northbridge itself. So they've thoughtfully made the Southbridge and Northbridge heat sinks completely separate. They haven't connected them via a heat pipe in order to make that possible. All right. So let's talk about this neighborhood. Actually no, let's talk about this first. So here we've got CMOS clear switch as well as a BIOS selector switch. Actually hold on. Is that the BIOS selector switch? I might be a little bit confused. Okay. Give me a sec. Sorry guys. This is the PWM frequency switch. So you can go from 600 to 800 to 1000 Hertz very easily up here. All right. All of these buttons over here all have different functionality. So this is the OC gear. So what that means is that the frequency up and frequency down buttons are either going to go up and down by one megahertz or 0.3 megahertz. So if you change the gear, it changes how fine the control you have over the base clock is. This button right here is just a one button overclock. So it just sets the CPU to four gigahertz on the next boot. This is pretty self-explanatory. That's the CPO ratio up or down with the press of a button so there is no delay. This is just a plain and simple hardware adjusting button. Awesome. We've got a power switch as well as a reset switch and here are all our voltage measurements. So you can use the little plugs that came with it. Here I'll show you guys that again so you can see how they go in. Yeah, here you go. And then the other ends of these are compatible with your multimeter so you can use the leads on there to check the voltages to a variety of things. So you can check the QPI PLL, VMCH core, CPU PLL, DDR VTT, the VDIM QPI VTT as well as the V-Core. So that's all of your critical ones right there. We've also got an LED post indicator so that will help with any troubleshooting that you may have to do with this board while it's being benchmarked. We've also got a couple other things here. So this is smart right here. Two SATA power connectors. Now what are those for? I am so sick of seeing auxiliary power connectors on motherboards that are Molex because I don't know about you guys but I actually don't have anything that plugs in in my system anymore via Molex except my water cooling pump. My water cooling pump is nowhere near my motherboard so what that means is that I have to run a completely separate modular cable up to my motherboard if I want to plug that auxiliary power in. It's stupid. This is smart. This is SATA power connectors near SATA data connectors. So what that means is wherever you're running these is probably reasonably close, probably near the front of your case which is where most cases mount the hard drives to where you're already running SATA power. So you run an additional cable or you run a cable to a drive and then the other two harnesses over to here. Great. Now you've got your auxiliary power being provided by SATA so that's awesome. Love that. Okay. Let's see if there's anything that I am missing here. Actually give me a sec. Two more things actually. Yeah so Gigabyte actually says that you can and by that I guess they mean they recommend you use two different rails on your power supply for these so that way you're not going to run into any limitations in terms of how much power you can provide to the PCI Express slots. The other thing is that they have specifically designed the PCI Express slots with all low profile components in between them. Also the spacing where they don't have slots here and here allows you to very easily insulate in between the PCI Express graphics slots for the best sub-zero performance and the most safety because you don't want to ruin those expensive and sometimes heavily modified graphics cards. It's a real pain to redo all of that work. Last but not least here is the BIOS switch. So you can switch between BIOS 1 and 2. This allows you to save up to 16 BIOS profiles. It also allows you to control and there's a little LED indicator to show you which one you're using on there but it allows you to control which BIOS you are using and you can even okay you can switch and you can flash to a new beta BIOS find out if that works better for you. Turns out it doesn't. Great. Switch back to your old BIOS. You've got your stable settings. No problem. Very cool feature. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews and other computer videos and thanks for checking out this video of the X58A OC. And one thing I didn't mention yet that I love, matte black PCB. So the product is therefore automatically made of win.