Releasing a motherboard based on the X58 chipset at this point might seem odd, but when you can offer a unique take on the overclocking market you might just find a niche. Gigabyte is hoping that is the case with the new X58A-OC model that is going to be priced very competively thanks in large part to the removal of many features.
The orange and black color scheme on the board is actually pretty unique while the layout is setup in a way for quad-GPUs – you are going to need that to break those overclocking records.
In the top right hand corner there are a host of overclocking specific features. The "4G" button will automatically overclock basically any Nehalem processor to something above 4.0 GHz while the Gear button will decrease the size of the increments available to the user on voltage to the processor. The ratio and frequency +/- buttons are going to be of great use for overclocking a system on the fly without having to go through the trouble of entering a BIOS. Don’t forget you have your power and reset buttons and voltage monitoring leads here too.
Where Gigabyte saves a bit of money is with the non-overclocking features; things like eSATA and high-end audio are left out so that the even the classic external connection space is pretty bare.
You will also notice near the SATA data connections some SATA-style power connectors as well. These are used to supply extra voltage to the PCI Express connections for overclocking and pushing quad graphics cards.
Computex 2011 Coverage brought to you by MSI Computer and Antec
