This motherboard is for your eyes only.
A name like Classified conjures up all kinds of things, most of which have almost nothing to do with motherboards, but exactly what secrets are there hidden in this one? Truth is... not much, but what is there is a pretty solid offering with everything that we'd expect from the Eternally Vaunted Grand Artistes at the EVGA design team (and if you want to get a look at it, we have a gallery here). Can they mash their heads together enough to make this board a secret worth coveting?
Built around the X58 chipset that we've seen used in other mobos, the Classified manages to bury it beneath a very swish custom heatsink. It's so pretty that we fell in love with it almost instantly, lusting over the three heatpipes and nickel-plated base of the northbridge heatsink wedge - and drooling over the smooth black surface of the southbridge. Even the power regulation is treated to a very nice nickel-plated heatsink, and certainly every component that usually gets quite warm under load was well managed. There's even a custom waterblock that you can buy for this mobo to give it an extra layer of cooling, but if you're sticking to air then there's plenty of room around for big heatsinks.
Starting at the I/O ports there are PS/2, eight USB, clear CMOS, Optical/Coaxial, Firewire, eSATA, twin Gigabit, 7.1 channel audio available, running off the Realtek ALC889 audio chip. Just behind these are two 8-pin CPU power sockets (yes, two!) that offer an extra place to plug in for those power supplies with dual connectors; but for most cases a single plug is more than you'll need. The 10-phase digital PWM is next, managing the power for the CPU and other components.
Three times the usual gold content has been stuffed into the LGA1366 socket of this mobo for better contact, but the six DDR3 slots are the same as any X58 board. A right-angle IDE sits next to eight right-angle SATA ports to give a nice expansion area, but we found that having an IDE device installed at the higher end when overclocking actually inhibited performance - removing the drive gave an extra 2MHz QPI - and behaved quite strangely.
Along the bottom is an LED POST screen, front panel headers, power and reset buttons and even a clear CMOS button. The expansion slots give room for TriSLI, but will run at all 8x with more than two cards. They can also do Crossfire up to three cards. A single PCIe x1 slot sits at the top, but is squeezed into a small space right next to the X58 chip and is too cramped for most soundcards.
We set out 'clocking this board, and after a quick BIOS flash to the latest version we found that the CPU multi detected as 25x (24x stock), but correctly detected as 24x under Windows. The overclocking options were well laid out and impeccably described, with plenty of profile save slots for settings and a lot of control over voltages. Unfortunately under air we didn't quite hit the 164 of the EVGA X58 SLI board, but we got it to 162 which isn't too bad.
Subzero cooling is where this board is designed to shine, but at $630 it's a lot to ask for.
This review will now self-destruct.
NOTE: This mobo has a fancy-pants PWM, but that doesn't always mean it's great or reliable - under testing we found that it ran the Vcore at 0.2V higher than set in the BIOS. Set at 1.4V meant that the CPU was burning away at 1.6V; it took 1.19875V to give us an effective 1.4V under use. This was the latest BIOS too, so could be potentially bad for those out there who are less attentive. Be warned!
Issue: 107 | December, 2009