Details of Gigabyte’s motherboard for overclockers emerge

Not for your average user

Jan 21, 2011 by

IF YOU HAVEN’T already noticed, Gigabyte is putting a lot of effort and money into the professional overclocking scene and the company has been working hard on developing a custom motherboard just for this niche of the market. The new board has been developed by Gigabyte’s in-house overclocker HiCookie and if you’re not into extreme overclocking, this product isn’t for you.

So far we only have limited details about the board in question, but it’s called the X58A-OC and the colour scheme is indeed matte black and orange. The one thing we do know is that the board has at least four x16 PCI Express slots, judging by the picture below posted on the unofficial/official Gigabyte blog, as the shot of the board shows it kitted out with four dual slot graphics cards.

It’s also clear that it’ll have a very small array of ports around the back which includes two PS/2 ports (a feature requested by competitive overclockers), two USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, a Gigabit Ethernet port and three audio jacks. We can’t think of a single full-size motherboard we’ve ever seen with so few ports. In a related blog post HiCookie has also explained why Gigabyte has gone for a matte black PCB and not a white PCB, again a requested feature.

It turns out that when you’re overclocking and using liquid nitrogen you tend to end up with condensation which means drops of water will form and at one stage or another, they’ll end up on the PCB. These are easy to spot on a dark PCB, but not so easy to spot on a light PCB. Another problem is that the white PCB’s are heat sensitive and if a board is sent in for RMA for whatever reason, re-soldering components would cause the white PCB to turn yellow due to the heat from the soldering.

We’ll keep you posted on the developments of this board and hopefully manage to get some hands on pictures closer to launch. It might not be a mass market product, but there’s no doubt that extreme overclocking is a growing hobby worldwide and it’s something Gigabyte has realised. However, we can’t imagine the X58A-OC to be a huge volume product for Gigabyte, but then again, considering the fairly basic feature set, we would expect Gigabyte to make a decent margin on it.S|A

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Lars-Göran Nilsson