The first non-NVIDIA chipset mobo from EVGA.
The realm of Intel chipset-based motherboards has been something that EVGA has stayed away from for quite some time, mostly due to the fact that they are solely NVIDIA-based - they had no real motivation to make any other kind of board. Since Intel made the agreement with NVIDIA for SLI on their X58 chipset, they've got a great excuse to make their own version of the mobo - and we're all for it.
We figure the more X58 boards floating around out there the better, since competition will be high and prices will (hopefully) be brought down fast enough so that veryone can afford a reasonably good mobo for their Nehalem chip. This one is called the X58 SLI, and as the name might very subtly suggest, it has both an X58 and does SLI.
Running the X58 chipset gives this mobo plenty of bandwidth for the expansion slots, giving two full PCIe 16X 2.0 slots, leaving the third slot to be taken care of by the NVIDIA NT200 chipset. This also enables SLI support, so up to three graphics cards can be whacked into the board without being restricted by the slower bus speed.
Supporting Nehalem also means supporting both the LGA1366 socket, and the QPI. The QPI replaces the FSB in traditional Intel boards, and is instead a bi-directional version of AMD's HyperTransport, offering increased bandwidth back and forth at the same time, independent of all the components.
Physically the board is very swish, with a black PCB and brightly coloured slots adorning it. There's a decent amount of clearance around the CPU socket too, so you can fit large coolers without too much worry. The voltage regulation gets its own heatsink that is like a mini-tower, consisting of a single heatpipe bent into a U shape and some fins. The northbridge is a shortish heatsink with a fan attached just underneath that plastic shroud (this was quite loud during testing thanks to the very small fan blades). This links to the southbridge via a very flat heatpipe, and the whole cooling array works quite well, though the voltage regulation got quite warm.
The six DDR3 slots are colour-coded to show the correct guide for memory channel use, with the green slot closest to the socket being used first. 24-pin power connection is in a good place, though the 8-pin is a little tricky to reach - sandwiched between the I/O panel and the heatsink.
Expansion slots consist of a right-angled IDE port and six right-angled SATA ports, with a further two normal ports along the bottom edge of the board. There's also a handy LED POST screen here, which doesn't show anything of use once the board has booted. Clear CMOS, power and reset buttons are here, while the latter two also have status LEDs to show power and HDD activity respectively.
There's an onboard speaker in the bottom-left corner, and the expansion slots have plenty of room for triSLI or Crossfire. I/O options are rather good as well, with eight USB, PS/2, Optical/Coaxial, Firewire, eSATA, two Ethernet, 7.1 audio and another more accessible clear CMOS button.
Overclocking of the board was quite nice, and we managed to eke out a max QPI speed of 164, a very solid result. Coupled with a great bundle, a decent price and EVGA's typically helpful support this is a perfect choice for any enthusiast rig.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012