Gigabyte X58A-OC Overclocking Motherboard Review

As with all of our reviews, we pit the default speed system against the overclocked one in a head-to-head byte match.  The effective overclock for these tests is 5.0GHz @ 30x multiplier and 166 BLCK.  The results are show below.

For these rests we removed the FrioOCK cooler and replaced it with a Single Stage Phase cooler to see what we could do.  The first step is to insulate the area around the CPU socket to prevent condensation and 5 minutes later we were done and ready to go.  The extra room around the CPU socket made insulating the motherboard extremely easy especially due to the square POScaps. 

For several years we have stuck to using retail processors in our reviews since we felt that is what the majority of users would be able to afford.  What we didn't realize was that motherboard makers often segmented their products to align with a certain processor.  

The X58A-OC is specifically designed for overclocking and while the 980X and 990X offer the most performance options that doesn't mean you are limited to just extreme edition processors.  Low end processors like the 920 and 950 can benefit from the power of a X58A-OC especially if you are planning to do 3D benches and simply need a stable platform to bench with.

Normally we limit our overclocking tests to whatever we started testing with but in the spirt of extreme overclocking we brought out the Single Stage Phase cooler and started tweaking.  Sadly summer time benching isn't the most rewarding but we were able to secure a stable 5Ghz overclock and followed our review benchmarks up with a 3D session for the HWBot team.