![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Monday , January 05, 2009
- Author:
- Daniel Dobrowolski
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
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?
BIOS
EVGA chose the Award BIOS for their EVGA X58 3X SLI motherboard. BIOS version E758_SZ18 was used for all testing as well as the screen captures shown below. The Award BIOS has changed very little since its inception more than a decade ago. Each manufacturer customizes it differently based on their needs for specific motherboards. So while the Award BIOS always looks the same, it will be slightly different going between brands or even models of motherboards.
The Award BIOS is divided into categories. Each category contains menus, and additional sub-menus that are for the purpose of adjusting settings related to that main category. The Standard CMOS Features menu contains the usual time and date settings, basic drive configuration settings and there is information displayed at the bottom of the screen concerning how much memory is installed.
Advanced BIOS features contains basic settings for boot priorities for hard drives, optical drives and other boot sources. This menu also controls the numlock and the full screen logo settings as well. Next is Integrated peripherals which contains settings that control the various onboard devices integrated into the board. Here you can set the drive controller modes, disable onboard LAN ports, sound, etc. Power management contains your basic ACPI settings and recovery after power loss options.
PnP/PCI Configuration contains display adapter ordering and IRQ settings control. PC Health contains information such as voltages, temperatures, and fan speeds. The SmartFan Function allows you to set temperature ranges and fan speed behavior based on the temperature ranges the user inputs. This allows you to tune the fan speed for lower noise or higher performance if desired.
Frequency/Voltage Control is where you'll find the settings relating to overclocking. Here you will find several settings as well as sub-menus that take you into other menus with even more settings. You'll find no unusual settings on the first page of this section except for one. There is an Extreme Cooling setting which simply gets enabled or disabled. Supposedly this overcomes instances where the board would have trouble booting when using it with some vapor phase or liquid nitrogen cooling systems. The first sub menu is Memory Feature. This allows you to adjust memory clocks as well as CAS latency, and other latency settings. Voltage control as the name implies allows you to set and control voltages for some of the system's hardware. This also contains EVGA's VDroop Control function which is supposed to reduce or even eliminate VDroop when enabled. CPU VCore, CPU VTT voltage, CPU PLL voltage, DIMM voltage, DIMM DQ Vref, and other voltages are all found here. You can even set the PWM Frequency here as well.
The next sub menu is the CPU Feature sub menu. This contains settings for the Core i7 processor features such as Intel SpeedStep, Turbo Mode Function, CXE function, Execute Disable Bit, Virtualization Technology support, Intel Hyperthreading, etc. You can also enable or disable CPU cores here and control QPI settings from this menu as well. The BIOS is well thought out and is easy to navigate. I've seen more options on more boards, but my feeling is that EVGA has provided enough settings for some serious overclocking. I would have liked to have seen a built in flash utility that was accessible from the main BIOS menu the way ASUS and so many others are doing now.