eVGA Classified 4-Way SLI X58 Core i7 Motherboard Unboxing & First Look
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2010-05-08
·
1,908 words · ~9 min read
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so by request and by sheer blind luck
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because we had one of these uh as an open box in like new condition I'm going
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to be having a look at the EVGA x58 four-way SLI classified motherboard so
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this has support for core i7 extreme core i7 it is an x58 board it is SLI and
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physics ready and it's also Crossfire ready but given that it's EVGA they're
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not exactly going to talk about that okay so the features list is is long I'm
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not going to say everything but I'll go ahead and tell you some of the key stuff
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okay so there's 10 SATA 2 3 gbit per second ports it has vrou control it has
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100% solid state capacitors which is what you'd expect on a premium premium
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board like this anodized black CPU
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socket with three times the amount of gold content that's a pretty cool
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feature it has a 10- phase digital pwm
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and it has the elite EVGA motherboard tuner software and you can use up to two
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8 Pin power connectors for this
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motherboard if you are taking your CPU to the extreme and you actually need
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that much power so it comes in an enormous black box okay so just for
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scale okay this is one of the times I'm going to pull this out that is how big
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the box is compared to the size of a normal motherboard okay so let's keeping
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keeping that in mind let's continue to go forward from here so let's open this
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guy up and have a look inside so okay
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there's evga's warranty information EVGA has a terrific warranty they have a
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great reputation for that so feel free to take advantage of that if you're
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buying an evj product I love these they include these with all of the
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motherboards that I've seen from them a visual guide of the motherboard that
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shows you the basics how to get it all set up to start with it labels
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everything for you and then on the back it gives you all of the pinouts for
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things like the front panel connectors okay so if you need any help with any
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jumpers that are available on the particular board they've uh spelled that
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all out for you I think that's a terrific thing to include with a
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motherboard a great little value ad okay here's their ECP V2 which basically
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connects via one cable to your motherboard and then gives you all of
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that onboard stuff that you might need so onboard power clear simos reset a
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little post LED that gives you codes if there's any problems with the system as
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well as oh PCIe disable jumpers so you can turn off some of the PCIe ports at
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looks like which I guess makes sense even there are an awful lot of them on
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this board in here you will find six black SATA cables can you see those at
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all yeah you can kind of see it okay and then one rounded IDE cable and then
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three Molex to two SATA adapters okay so
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that's pretty nice in here you will find a three-way SLI Bridge cuz if you're
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buying a board like this you had better be running three-way or fourway SLI so
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this is a four four-way SLI Bridge here that means that with the EVGA GTX 295
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classified you can actually run four cards at a time on this board here is
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the cable for the little um whatever it's called ECP thing that has all of
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your onboard switches and whatnot there's a standard SLI Bridge Okay so
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this is a floppy Bridge so it means that you can plug the Cards into a variety of
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connectors you can decide which one you want to use here's your IO Shield okay
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it's got that puffy stuff on the back of it not actually sure why that is but a
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lot of the high-end ASUS boards and apparently EVGA boards have that all
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right so let's get this motherboard oh no there's more accessories okay so
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that's got two USB and one fire wire port for the back of your case and then
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finally we have the motherboard users manual as well as a driver disc and a
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case badge ooh that's nice three-way SLI case badge all right and then there's a
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little note in here you have just purchased an incredible piece of technology with four-way SLI support 10
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phase digital pwm in oh in order to run four-way SLI mode you will need to have
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the hardware to support it so you need the two oh no it just says it's a
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perfect match it doesn't say you need that okay uh dedicated PCIe Molex
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connector so make sure you plug that in and this motherboard is designed for the
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extreme it requires to be run in either
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a 10 slot PC chassis or an open air
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chassis if your chassis does not meet these requirements please please do not
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install this motherboard okay so that's a pretty important note to have on there
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so why don't we go ahead close that up and then I'm going to I'm going to close
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the box cuz that gives us a good place to um to demo the board itself okay so
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let's get this out of the baggie here
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okay oh okay you can see that this is on
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there pretty good all right motherboard coming out
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next wow look at that so that is the
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classified four-way SLI I don't even
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know where to start with this thing so why don't we start at the CPU socket
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like I normally do so this is an LGA
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1366 motherboard okay so that means that
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you've got support like I said before for the core i7 and core i7 extreme you
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can see that the CPU socket itself is extremely shiny can you see the the the
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finger shot there so that is one of the things that they've done they're using a
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high quality Lo socket okay you've got
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support for triple Channel DDR3 memory
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as per the normal Arrangement on an x58 motherboard your power connectors and
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these are kind of unique are in their ideal locations you got your 24 pin
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power connector here and then up here you have not one but two eight pin CPU
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power connectors so check that out I can't actually get that off okay so you
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have two eight pins up here on the top left of the board and their ideal
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locations all right then in terms of the chipset cooling this is incredible
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because you can't actually run this many PCI Express slots off just an x58
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chipset so they've had to add I believe it's one but I guess it could be as many
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as two nf200 chips to this motherboard
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so you can see that's why we've got this huge huge heat sink area which actually
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is connected by a heat pipe or two so you can see under here the heat pipes
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can you see those kind of kind of down there yeah so you got heat pipes
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connecting it to this fan or this fin Arrangement okay which is just enormous
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and you can kind of see through that and then a tiny little 40 mm fan right here
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making sure that it gets at least a little bit of airf flow so that's what's
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doing all of the chipset cooling on this motherboard okay so why don't we keep on
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moving down so here we've got yeah okay
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SATA ports so we've got eight SATA 2
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ports here then we have oh this is this
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is terrific because all of the onboard power reset clear seos all that stuff is
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on the motherboard so this connector way over here to run the little EV whatever
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thing that it's called is actually just an alternate one just in case you've got
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a bunch of video cards installed which covers all of this stuff and you need
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access to it that's great so you've got seven PCI Express 16x slots and they're
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actually further down on the motherboard than they would be on a normal normal
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board so I actually I'm going to pull out that other board here for a second
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again and I'm going to show you just for scale how long this motherboard is
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compared to a typical ATX board so cameraman can you try and get like a top
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down view you can see it's actually one slot too long versus what a normal board
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would be so that's that's pretty cool besides that it's actually wider than a
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normal spec ATX board by about a couple
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centim there so if you look over on the right hand side you can see this board
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is just huge so that means besides being
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longer your case is going to have to have a little bit of extra room on the
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side on the on the right hand edge of the board to make room for this extra
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strip here okay so why don't we keep on moving here there's an onboard speaker
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right here's the sorry about that my memory card ran out again so right here
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we have the Molex connector so if you're actually plugging in all those graphics
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cards this is a supplementary power connector to make sure that they're all
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getting enough juice to run properly all right so why I think we're almost done
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here but the last thing we want to look at is the 10 phase digital pwm that
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they've installed on this motherboard so you can see under there that's where all
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of the Power regulation stuff is going on all right and then let's move around
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actually one thing that would be important to people buying a board like this is you see how bare the CPU socket
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is it's perfect for insulating all around the CPU socket if you're going to
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be running like Subzero cooling on it or anything like that okay so why don't we
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move around have a quick look at the back of the board and then I think we're
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pretty much done we've got one PS2 Port here for a keyboard we've got 1 2 3 4 5
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6 7 8 USB 2.0 ports we've got a clear
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seos button and then uh uhoh I'm in
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trouble I don't know what this is for uh maybe someone can leave it in the
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comments and then I'll make an annotation okay so then we've got fire
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wire eSATA 2 GB Ethernet and 7.1 audio
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so thank you for checking out my uh my quick unboxing and first look at the
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EVGA classified four-way SLI motherboard