Gigabyte X58A-OC Intel X58 Motherboard Review

Overclocking
This is an overclocking motherboard so there are quite a few different ways to overclock the motherboard.  First let’s talk about the easiest way.  Gigabyte includes their EasyTune6 software with the board.  With this software you can easily tune the system to your liking.  There is also a quick boost feature that has 3 set overlclocks depending on your processor.

Gigabyte X58A-OC Intel X58 Motherboard Gigabyte X58A-OC Intel X58 Motherboard

The next way to overclock this board is via the buttons on the board itself.  First there is the 4G button, which when pressed instantly (upon restart) overclocks the system to 4GHz.  After the restart our system was running at 4GHz with the multiplier set at 25 and the bus speed set at 160.  You can also use the OC-Touch buttons to easy overclock your system on the fly.  The lower 2 buttons adjust your CPU ratio and the top 2 buttons adjust your CPU frequency.  The Gear button switches between 1MHz and 0.3MHz intervals for the CPU frequency.

Gigabyte X58A-OC Intel X58 Motherboard Gigabyte X58A-OC Intel X58 Motherboard

Finally you can overclock the system the old school way in the BIOS.  Maybe I am old school, but I always prefer overclocking in the BIOS.  So let’s go over our little overclocking journey.  I first got the system up to 4.16GHz using a frequency of 160 and a multiplier of 26.

Gigabyte X58A-OC Intel X58 Motherboard

I decided to change things up a little bit and set the frequency to 200 and used a multiplier of 21 to get to 4.2GHz.

Gigabyte X58A-OC Intel X58 Motherboard

I tried to go right up to 4.4Ghz, but Windows would blue screen upon startup so I went back to the 160 frequency and used a multiplier of 27.  This brought the system up to 4.3GHz, which was the highest overclock we were able to attain and the highest overclock we have ever attained with this processor.

Gigabyte X58A-OC Intel X58 Motherboard

Now this overclock was not stable.  Both PCMark Vantage and 3DMark Vantage made the system bluescreen.  So I moved back down to 4.2GHz.  Everything seemed to run fine, except 3DMark 11.  For whatever reason the program would lock up, the system would not bluescreen just 3DMark 11 would eventually crash.  I would say the system was stable at 4.2GHz, but for testing sake I moved the system down to 4GHz to run our overclocking benchmarks.

About Author