[H]ard|OCP

Navigation

• [H] Forums
• Archives
• Search
• [H] Folding

EVGA X58 3X SLI Motherboard

EVGA brings us its first Intel processor motherboard using the X58 chipset. We've seen quite a few exceptional X58 motherboards so far. Is EVGA’s design going to have what it takes to compete with the rest in terms of performance, stability, and overclocking?

Introduction

EVGA has been around for some time now. They are perhaps known best for their video cards but they are also well known to the enthusiast for their NVIDIA chipset based motherboards. Honestly, these have been hit or miss for the community. Up until EVGA put out their “FTW” series of motherboards all had previously been an NVIDIA reference design. While these designs all had their upsides, they all had a few flaws as well.

Apparently EVGA agreed with that assessment and contracted motherboard engineers in order to create its own designs. EVGA previously addressed the weak points of the reference designs and made much more solid solutions. EVGA’s 790i SLI FTW Digital PWM motherboard was a fairly solid offering, but their 750i SLI FTW was absolutely fantastic. Now EVGA is putting out designs that are uniquely its own that resemble no reference design, at least as far as we can tell. At first glance EVGA has put its "A-Game" into the X58 3X SLI motherboard. The board appeared to have solid build quality and a great layout. We all noticed this right out of the box.

The EVGA X58 3X SLI is based on Intel's X58 chipset and ICH10R south bridge. Unlike the ASUS P6T6 WS Revolution, the EVGA motherboard does not use NVIDIA's nForce 200 MCP that delivers “true” x16 PCIe bandwidth to three physical x16 slots. That could be a good or bad thing depending on your point of view (and we have an upcoming article addressing that), but what that does mean is that you get two electrical x8 PCI-Express 2.0 lanes while running 3-Way SLI or CrossfireX using three or more video cards. This board supports triple channel DDR3 memory up to 1600MHz or higher and a total memory limit of 12GB installed via six DIMMs. The board features an 8-phase power design and solid state capacitors. I would have liked to have seen 12 or 16 phase power but an 8-phase design can certainly get the job done provided that it is well implemented. In that vein EVGA has their VDroop control which is supposed to stabilize voltages and eliminate power fluctuations and some guesswork out of the motherboards voltages that are supplied to motherboard components and other components like the CPU and memory modules.

Main Specifications Overview:

Detailed Specifications Overview:

Packaging

The board is contained with the usual style of EVGA packaging. The motherboard is protected in a durable plastic clamshell with the accessories thrown in on top of it. The clamshell provides great motherboard handling and shipping protection, but the downside is none of the accessories are contained so to remove the motherboard from the clamshell you end up with the accessories strew around instead of staying organized until you have need of them. The box itself is so flimsy that relying on it to harbor your accessories till later is not a good idea. (Get a Ziploc bag so you don’t lose anything!) The board comes with an SLI bridge, 3-Way SLI bridge, manual, driver disk, quick start guide, padded I/O shield, and of course the usual compliment of SATA cables. My first impressions of the board were initially very positive.

Board Layout

The layout of the EVGA X58 3X SLI is quite good with no problem areas or clearance issues that I could define. The interesting thing about that is EVGA literally has only designed about half a dozen boards while other companies with hundreds of designs under the belt struggle to create a layout this good. Kudos to EVGA.

The CPU area has a good amount of clearance around it. There is plenty of room for large CPU coolers and water blocks. I had absolutely no problems fitting a Thermalright Ultra 120 Extreme to this board. There isn't much else to say. EVGA did a great job on X58’s board layout. (Editor's Note: The one issue I did have with the board pertained to the secondary 12v 8-pin power connector on the board. This board has this rather tall cooling solution on the PWM MOSFETs. The secondary power connector is adjacent to this and it makes it nearly impossible to easily remove the power plug. This required me to get out the hemostats or long-nosed pliers to remove the power plug or I otherwise would have had to bend the cooling solution over compromising the mating surface.)

The six DDR3 DIMM slots are positioned off-center from the CPU socket which is unusual for a Core i7 processor compatible motherboard. There have been some thoughts on HardOCP’s part that this might be of issue, but we have not seen those issues manifest themselves on the EVGA motherboard. The clearances around the memory slots are all good. Large CPU coolers shouldn't run into even the largest of heat spreaders that are often attached to high performance RAM. The board supports up to 12GB of DDR3 memory modules. Of course since the clearances around the memory slots are very generous it is no problem to install or remove memory slots even with larger video cards installed. This is always a good thing in my book.

The north bridge is just to the left of the CPU socket, it is a heatpipe cooler that is also actively cooled by a fairly large (for a chipset) fan that is installed on top of it. The cooling was adequate for stock and overclocked operation never allowing the chipset to reach temperatures too hot to the touch. As we've stated before, the X58 chipset runs extremely cool compared to the last generation of Intel chipsets as the memory controller is now integrated into the CPU itself.

The south bridge is located in front of the first two PCI-Express x16 slots. The north bridge and south bridge are connected by their common cooling solution. The unfortunate part about the southbridge cooler is that it is ugly, but seemingly function has taken presence over form thankfully. The solution is nice and flat so that it doesn't interfere with the installed video cards. The solution proved to be adequate at stock speeds and while overclocked. It never really got all that hot to the touch. One thing I can't stand about the board (and incidentally, all EVGA boards I've ever seen) is that they do not use the newer locking type of SATA ports. They use the right angle ports which I really like, but the ports do not easily accept locking SATA cables. Funny thing is that locking SATA cables are supplied with the motherboard. (Editor's Note: A reader updated us on 1/6/09 that some of these boards were in fact being supplied with the proper locking headers to use with the locking cables! Some were not.)

The expansion slot configuration of the X58 3X SLI is optimal for 3-Way SLI. I'd like to have seen more PCI-Express slots and fewer PCI slots but that's just me. Beyond that the expansion slots are placed reasonably well. There are three PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slots which operate in an 16x8x8 configuration when in 3-Way SLI. There is one PCI-Express x1 slot, and two legacy PCI slots.

The I/O panel has a PS/2 keyboard port, 8 USB ports, 1 IEEE1394a port, 2 RJ-45 ports, 1 optical out port, 1 S/PDIF port, 1 eSATA port, and six mini-headphone jacks for sound output. There is also a clear CMOS button on the back plane as well.

EVGA E-LEET

The EVGA E-LEET utility is a new one for EVGA. This is my first time seeing it. The utility is simple and straight forward. Those of you who are familiar with CPU-Z will recognize the similarities immediately. All of the same information CPU-Z displays is present here. In fact the first two tabs at the top are the same as they are in CPU-Z. The first one is CPU information and the second is memory information.

The E-LEET utility also contains hardware monitoring capabilities. Voltages, Temperatures and fan speeds are all shown here. In addition you can monitor the temperatures core by core. There is also an overclocking component to the utility allowing the user to overclock their system from within Windows. You have clock controls, and turbo mode control. There is also a "Bring O/C" option. There is a separate voltages tab which contains voltage adjustments for just about anything you could ever need to adjust. The adjustments take place in the form of drop down menus. The Options tab is the last part of the utility which contains profile management for saving and loading E-LEET profiles. You can also stop polling in the utility which will prevent it from refreshing the information. Finally you have the ability to create a CPU-Z validation file.

All in all it is a simple utility. I like the CPU-Z component of it and the fact that there is nothing complex to install. You just run the utility from the executable and that's it. It is all self-contained. The overclocking is mediocre in that I found much better results in manual adjustment. However that is to be expected as that is always the case in our experience.