Gadgetory

so by request and by sheer blind luck because we had one of these about as an open box in like new condition I'm gonna be having a look at the EVGA x58 4 Way SLI classified motherboard so this has support for core i7 xtreme core i7 it is an X 58 board is SLI and physics ready and it's also crossfire ready but given that at EVGA they're not exactly going to talk about that ok so the features list is long I'm not gonna say everything but I'll go ahead and tell you some of the key stuff ok so there's 10 say 2 to 3 gigabit per second ports it has V group control it has a hundred percent 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 2 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 ok so just for scale ok this is one of the times I'm gonna pull this out that is how big the box is compared to the size of a normal motherboard okay so let's keep the keeping that in mind let's continue to go forward from here so let's open this guy up and have a look inside oh ok there's a BJ'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 EVGA 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 pin outs for things like the front panel connectors ok so if you need any help with any jumpers that are available on the particular board they've spelled that all out for you I think that's a terrific thing to include with the motherboard it's a great little value that ok here's their ECP v2 which basically connects one cable to your motherboard and then gives you all of that onboard stuff that you might need so on board power clear CMOS reset a little post led that gives you codes if there's any problems with the system as well as PCIe disable jumpers so you can turn off some of the PCIe ports it looks like which I guess makes sense to them they're 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 theta adapters that's pretty nice I mean here you will find a 3-way SLI bridge because if you're buying a board like this you had better be running 3-way or four-way SLI so this is a 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 put a little um whatever is called ECP thing that has all of your own board switches and whatnot there's a standard sli bridge okay so this is a floppy bridge so it means that you can plug these cards into a variety of connectors you can decide which one you want to use here's your i/o shield they've got that puppy stuff on the back of it I'm not actually sure why that is but a lot of the high-end Estes boards and apparently EVGA board have that alright so let's get this motherboard oh no there's more accessories okay so that's got two USB and one firewire port for the back of your case and then finally we have the motherboard user's manual as well as a driver disk and a case baju that's nice 3-way SLI case vag alright 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 all 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 the perfect match it doesn't say you need that ok a 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 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 gonna I'm gonna close the box and that gives us a good place to to demo the mortise so okay so let's get this out of the baby here all right motherboard coming out now 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 finger shot there so that is one of the things that they've done they're using a high-quality loads 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 8 pin CPU power connectors so check that out I can't actually get that off ok so you have two 8 pins up here on the top left of the board in there ideal locations alright then in terms of the chipset cooling this is incredible because you can't actually run this many PCI Express slots off just an X 58 chipset so they've had to add I believe it's one but I guess it could be as many as 2 NF 200 chips to this motherboard so you can see that's why we've got this huge huge heatsink 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 fat art this fin arrangement okay which is just enormous and you can kind of see through that and then tiny little 40 millimeter fan right here making sure that it gets at least a little bit of airflow 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 CMOS all of that stuff is on the motherboard so this connector way over here to run the little Evie 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 board so I'm actually I'm gonna pull out that other board here for a second again and I'm gonna show you just for scale how long this motherboard is compared to a typical ATX board so if cameraman can you try and get like a top-down view you can see it's actually one slot to 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 centimeters 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 gonna 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 on board speaker right here's them 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 alright 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 alright 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 sub-zero cooling on it or anything like that ok 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 CMOS button and then uh-oh I'm in trouble I don't know what this is for maybe someone can leave it in the comments and then I'll make an annotation okay so then we've got firewire eSATA 2 Gigabit Ethernet and 7.1 audio so thank you for checking out my my quick unboxing and first look at the EVGA classified 4 Way SLI motherboard