Lucrative features, but is it worth the high asking price?
Intel's P55 Express chipset has well and truly hit computer stores (and most likely a lot of rigs) and while the P55 has proven to be quite popular, it's also limited by certain hardware restrictions, namely the availability of only sixteen PCIe 2.0 lanes. This translates into only dual 8x bandwidth available to graphics cards, a restriction that might affect performance with high-bandwidth cards such as the ATI 5xxx series or competing NVIDIA products soon to be released in the first half of 2010. EVGA realised that this was a problem, and thanks to its very close relationship with NVIDIA as a primary manufacturing partner, the company got its hands on the NF200 - a co-chipset that boosts the PCIe lane complement from sixteen to thirty two. While this will definitely increase the lane count, it also brings higher board complexity and the additional cost of the chip itself.
The layout of the board itself is pretty neat, packing in a large array of heatsinks around the PWM but still managing to leave enough room for both LGA1156 and LGA775 mounting holes, perfect for those with existing heatsinks or waterblocks. There's just enough clearance above the dull copper heatsink in the middle of the motherboard to install tall coolers such as the TRUE but it's tighter than a sumo wrestler in a pair of Speedos, so be warned. DDR3 memory in dual channel is pretty standard, with a handy pre-applied sticker telling you which slots to use first (the grey, in case you were wondering). A 24-pin power connector lies on the right hand side of the motherboard, and oddly there are two 8-pin ATX power connectors in the top-left corner. Explained in the manual, these two connectors can work together (assuming the PSU has dual plugs) to give a theoretical 600W of 12V power - completely overkill when the TDP of Lynnfield is stock at 95W, making this design choice similar to adding a fourth side to a triangle.
Also strange were the storage options, or lack thereof. Six right-angle SATA ports are the order of the day, curiously limited considering the price of the board and not joined by IDE or Floppy (though the latter is pretty useless nowadays). Thankfully EVGA negate this omission somewhat by throwing in an LED POST screen at the bottom that displays CPU temperatures after POST has completed. Joining the screen are three buttons at the lower edge of the board, providing a Clear CMOS option as well as Power and Reset functions. There's even a hardwired speaker at the bottom that is useful for POST codes, making it impossible to forget when wiring it up.
Thanks to the NF200 chip used there are four 16x PCIe slots, which run at dual 16x or quadruple 8x depending on the amount of graphics cards used. There's a Molex connector placed nearby to boost delivery of the 12v rail, but it is limited to dual Crossfire due to the NVIDIA chip. While the NF200 chip does bridge some of the limitations of the platform, it also brings a huge amount of heat and cost - for the price you pay, you might as well just get an X58 board for even cheaper! This really is a confusing move as even EVGA's very own X58 SLI LE clocks in with arguably superior features at a price $100 less! As a P55 motherboard the performance is almost identical to our current favourite (ASUS' P7P55D Deluxe), hitting an OC result of 4290MHz (195 x 22, 1.4375V). What it boils down to is a board that performs well, but is priced too high to be worth buying compared to competing products and platforms.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012