so by request and by sheer blind luck
because we had one of these uh as an open box in like new condition I'm going
to be having a look at the EVGA x58 four-way SLI classified motherboard so
this has support for core i7 extreme core i7 it is an x58 board it is SLI and
physics ready and it's also Crossfire ready but given that it's EVGA they're
not exactly going to talk about that okay so the features list is is long I'm
not going to say everything but I'll go ahead and tell you some of the key stuff
okay so there's 10 SATA 2 3 gbit per second ports it has vrou control it has
100% solid state capacitors which is what you'd expect on a premium premium
board like this anodized black CPU
socket with three times the amount of gold content that's a pretty cool
feature it has a 10- phase digital pwm
and it has the elite EVGA motherboard tuner software and you can use up to two
8 Pin power connectors for this
motherboard if you are taking your CPU to the extreme and you actually need
that much power so it comes in an enormous black box okay so just for
scale okay this is one of the times I'm going to pull this out that is how big
the box is compared to the size of a normal motherboard okay so let's keeping
keeping that in mind let's continue to go forward from here so let's open this
guy up and have a look inside so okay
there's evga's warranty information EVGA has a terrific warranty they have a
great reputation for that so feel free to take advantage of that if you're
buying an evj product I love these they include these with all of the
motherboards that I've seen from them a visual guide of the motherboard that
shows you the basics how to get it all set up to start with it labels
everything for you and then on the back it gives you all of the pinouts for
things like the front panel connectors okay so if you need any help with any
jumpers that are available on the particular board they've uh spelled that
all out for you I think that's a terrific thing to include with a
motherboard a great little value ad okay here's their ECP V2 which basically
connects via one cable to your motherboard and then gives you all of
that onboard stuff that you might need so onboard power clear simos reset a
little post LED that gives you codes if there's any problems with the system as
well as oh PCIe disable jumpers so you can turn off some of the PCIe ports at
looks like which I guess makes sense even there are an awful lot of them on
this board in here you will find six black SATA cables can you see those at
all yeah you can kind of see it okay and then one rounded IDE cable and then
three Molex to two SATA adapters okay so
that's pretty nice in here you will find a three-way SLI Bridge cuz if you're
buying a board like this you had better be running three-way or fourway SLI so
this is a four four-way SLI Bridge here that means that with the EVGA GTX 295
classified you can actually run four cards at a time on this board here is
the cable for the little um whatever it's called ECP thing that has all of
your onboard switches and whatnot there's a standard SLI Bridge Okay so
this is a floppy Bridge so it means that you can plug the Cards into a variety of
connectors you can decide which one you want to use here's your IO Shield okay
it's got that puffy stuff on the back of it not actually sure why that is but a
lot of the high-end ASUS boards and apparently EVGA boards have that all
right so let's get this motherboard oh no there's more accessories okay so
that's got two USB and one fire wire port for the back of your case and then
finally we have the motherboard users manual as well as a driver disc and a
case badge ooh that's nice three-way SLI case badge all right and then there's a
little note in here you have just purchased an incredible piece of technology with four-way SLI support 10
phase digital pwm in oh in order to run four-way SLI mode you will need to have
the hardware to support it so you need the two oh no it just says it's a
perfect match it doesn't say you need that okay uh dedicated PCIe Molex
connector so make sure you plug that in and this motherboard is designed for the
extreme it requires to be run in either
a 10 slot PC chassis or an open air
chassis if your chassis does not meet these requirements please please do not
install this motherboard okay so that's a pretty important note to have on there
so why don't we go ahead close that up and then I'm going to I'm going to close
the box cuz that gives us a good place to um to demo the board itself okay so
let's get this out of the baggie here
okay oh okay you can see that this is on
there pretty good all right motherboard coming out
next wow look at that so that is the
classified four-way SLI I don't even
know where to start with this thing so why don't we start at the CPU socket
like I normally do so this is an LGA
1366 motherboard okay so that means that
you've got support like I said before for the core i7 and core i7 extreme you
can see that the CPU socket itself is extremely shiny can you see the the the
finger shot there so that is one of the things that they've done they're using a
high quality Lo socket okay you've got
support for triple Channel DDR3 memory
as per the normal Arrangement on an x58 motherboard your power connectors and
these are kind of unique are in their ideal locations you got your 24 pin
power connector here and then up here you have not one but two eight pin CPU
power connectors so check that out I can't actually get that off okay so you
have two eight pins up here on the top left of the board and their ideal
locations all right then in terms of the chipset cooling this is incredible
because you can't actually run this many PCI Express slots off just an x58
chipset so they've had to add I believe it's one but I guess it could be as many
as two nf200 chips to this motherboard
so you can see that's why we've got this huge huge heat sink area which actually
is connected by a heat pipe or two so you can see under here the heat pipes
can you see those kind of kind of down there yeah so you got heat pipes
connecting it to this fan or this fin Arrangement okay which is just enormous
and you can kind of see through that and then a tiny little 40 mm fan right here
making sure that it gets at least a little bit of airf flow so that's what's
doing all of the chipset cooling on this motherboard okay so why don't we keep on
moving down so here we've got yeah okay
SATA ports so we've got eight SATA 2
ports here then we have oh this is this
is terrific because all of the onboard power reset clear seos all that stuff is
on the motherboard so this connector way over here to run the little EV whatever
thing that it's called is actually just an alternate one just in case you've got
a bunch of video cards installed which covers all of this stuff and you need
access to it that's great so you've got seven PCI Express 16x slots and they're
actually further down on the motherboard than they would be on a normal normal
board so I actually I'm going to pull out that other board here for a second
again and I'm going to show you just for scale how long this motherboard is
compared to a typical ATX board so cameraman can you try and get like a top
down view you can see it's actually one slot too long versus what a normal board
would be so that's that's pretty cool besides that it's actually wider than a
normal spec ATX board by about a couple
centim there so if you look over on the right hand side you can see this board
is just huge so that means besides being
longer your case is going to have to have a little bit of extra room on the
side on the on the right hand edge of the board to make room for this extra
strip here okay so why don't we keep on moving here there's an onboard speaker
right here's the sorry about that my memory card ran out again so right here
we have the Molex connector so if you're actually plugging in all those graphics
cards this is a supplementary power connector to make sure that they're all
getting enough juice to run properly all right so why I think we're almost done
here but the last thing we want to look at is the 10 phase digital pwm that
they've installed on this motherboard so you can see under there that's where all
of the Power regulation stuff is going on all right and then let's move around
actually one thing that would be important to people buying a board like this is you see how bare the CPU socket
is it's perfect for insulating all around the CPU socket if you're going to
be running like Subzero cooling on it or anything like that okay so why don't we
move around have a quick look at the back of the board and then I think we're
pretty much done we've got one PS2 Port here for a keyboard we've got 1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 USB 2.0 ports we've got a clear
seos button and then uh uhoh I'm in
trouble I don't know what this is for uh maybe someone can leave it in the
comments and then I'll make an annotation okay so then we've got fire
wire eSATA 2 GB Ethernet and 7.1 audio
so thank you for checking out my uh my quick unboxing and first look at the
EVGA classified four-way SLI motherboard