Legit Reviews

EVGA E761 X58 SLI Classified Motherboard Review

The Intel X58 Express chipset is your only choice for Intel Core i7 procssors, but that doesn't mean that all motherboards have been created equal. The EVGA X58 Classified motherboard raises the bar for enthusiast grade motherboards with several features not on any other motherboard!

What is there to say? The EVGA X58 E761 Classified is like an over-the-top blockbuster movie; it wows you on all fronts all the while costing an arm and a leg to produce. Core i7 is a new processor and motherboard and BIOS engineers are still figuring it out, but the team at EVGA has clearly stumbled across something to be able to release a board that pushes these chips past the notorious 220MHz base clock wall. This board reminds me a lot of the Asus LGA775 Rampage Extreme, except the Rampage Extreme came so late in the game.

Article Title: EVGA E761 X58 SLI Classified Motherboard Review
Article URL: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/991/1/
Pricing At Time of Print: $399 shipped from Newegg

Good read! Impressive overclocking potential, even with that not-so-hot chip! That being said, I wonder how long it would last under those huge OCs

I got the E760 version of this board. As far as I can tell, it cost more and I got less (namely the OC panel).

But I chose the board for several other reasons. First, I liked the idea of the 10-phase Digital PWM section. Second, I liked the idea of there being more "gold" in the CPU socket, as this should improve conductivity and corrosion resistance (Though there might be some indications that something is WRONG here... http://www.evga.com/forums/tm.asp?m=100 ... #100743740 ). And Third, I liked the layout of the board.

I've paired this with a D0 stepping 920 and a Prolimatech Megahalems, with 2 Xilence 57CFM fans. For memory I chose a 3GB set of Corsair Dominator 1866MHz sticks (yeah only 3GB because I want to use this for Gaming and I still prefer a 32-bit OS for that... in this instance I'll load up a 32-bit version of Windows 7 RC). The video card will only be one MSI Geforce 275GTX atm, though I'm wanting to get a second (have to wait to get paid for another job first!). And for sound I chose Creative's X-Fi PCIe Fatality Pro, though an Asus Xonar DS might have been a better choice for pure music enjoyment. So as of the night before last, all of this is now installed now installed in my HAF 932 case.

Here's a pic


And a close up of the PM's fans installed. (Those clips were a bit hard to get on the bottom!)


After doing all this I had to wait for more HDDs and a BD-ROM drive to arrive. So later this after noon I'll be installing the OS and having fun.

Sweet pc you've got going on there

Dan

Nice rig build up there, wish I had that for my daily rig. Let me know how your overclocking endeavors go, I stopped after 220bclk on air. Now my Classified is reserved for benchmarking until I kill it with condensation

Regarding that EVGA Forums link with the destroyed socket, the only thing I can think of is he either got the socket hot enough to weaken to weak the solder bonds holding the pins in place, something adhesive was layered on the back of his CPU when he put it in the socket and yanked pins, or the solder joints coming from the factory were fubar. With my Classified I've pushed the CPU up to 90C on the stock cooler and I've already swapped CPUs about a dozen times, so unless he was beating his CPU harder than I beat mine, it sounds like a manufacturing defect. It is a tough call though.. this board is a tank and it is boggling how he managed to damage it that way Looks like someone tried to put an AM3 cpu into the LGA1366 socket and rotated the CPU

stopthekilling77 wrote:Good read! Impressive overclocking potential, even with that not-so-hot chip! That being said, I wonder how long it would last under those huge OCs

I'll let you guys know when and how I kill it. I think the PWM would hold up for hundreds if not thousands of hours at 1.5-1.6v and it is typically the PWM on these high-end boards that blow-up, killing it. So, in theory I imagine it could last years before a component degrades to failure. I'm hoping for a solid 4 to 6 months of benching, maybe 200-300 hours sub-zero.

Thanks for this revie...

Do i need to write that this is my wet dreem MB.

Thanks chris for quick mail answer to SWEDEN we like to thank all for this haleluja moment. (yes we are watercooling build geeks)

Y sad it all this is the best and i will sell my car for this MB and some Koolance stuff.


PS. And thanks EVGA...

Just wanted to point out one potential competitor that is actually more expensive: the Asus P6T7 workstation SuperComputer retailed for about $450 when I bought one last week from NewEgg. Clearly the Asus is meant more for parallelism rather than extreme overclocking, but I like the fact that having all of those PCI-Express slots means so much more flexibility for where one can place GPUs, RAID cards and sound cards. The Classified requires either (1) some single-slot GPU(s), or (2) a supertower case (like the Armor Plus) which provides more than 7 expansion slots, so as to make use of that last PCI-E slot with a double-thick GPU hanging over the edge.

I haven't tried overclocking my P6T7 yet, and am instead using it for work and a super-Folding@home rig, hosting 6 GPUs (2x9800GX2s and 2x8800GTXs).

(But I should mention that I have a rig dedicated for gaming, based on the older 759 model of the Classified (w/the NF200 chip). It was easy to overclock my lowly C0-stepped 920 to 4GHz on a basic water-cooled setup. Having acquired a new D0-stepped 920 on eBay for only $276, I'll soon try to get 4.4GHz or so...but I'm never going to go cooler than liquid again.)

Gomeler wrote:...<snip>...
Regarding that EVGA Forums link with the destroyed socket, the only thing I can think of is he either got the socket hot enough to weaken to weak the solder bonds holding the pins in place, something adhesive was layered on the back of his CPU when he put it in the socket and yanked pins, or the solder joints coming from the factory were fubar. With my Classified I've pushed the CPU up to 90C on the stock cooler and I've already swapped CPUs about a dozen times, so unless he was beating his CPU harder than I beat mine, it sounds like a manufacturing defect. It is a tough call though.. this board is a tank and it is boggling how he managed to damage it that way Looks like someone tried to put an AM3 cpu into the LGA1366 socket and rotated the CPU

I personally suspect he turned on the "Extreme Cooling" option in BIOS, but he was only using a water-cooling setup. But the fact is that I have no idea. I just know that some people do stupid things, then they don't want to take responsibility for what happens. Still I can't say that he is like that... I just know it happens. And overall the reason for my bringing that up was that it illustrates the fact that "nothing is perfect"!

Gomeler wrote:

stopthekilling77 wrote:Good read! Impressive overclocking potential, even with that not-so-hot chip! That being said, I wonder how long it would last under those huge OCs

I'll let you guys know when and how I kill it. I think the PWM would hold up for hundreds if not thousands of hours at 1.5-1.6v and it is typically the PWM on these high-end boards that blow-up, killing it. So, in theory I imagine it could last years before a component degrades to failure. I'm hoping for a solid 4 to 6 months of benching, maybe 200-300 hours sub-zero.

Sadly I don't have room to set up a "Bench Testing" rig. However, I do intend to see how well I can get this system tweaked out. At the same time, I'll have a backup system in my P6T, so if this setup goes catiwompus on me I don't go "Offline"... ;) It's just that this is the best OC I've had since my Celeron days. Even my slot-1 Athlon, never saw these type of gains... so it's sad that Intel has to "poop" on the party. I think they're making a mistake by killing the 920s.

Just a short update to this. I'm in Detroit for an overclocking get together and I had a chance to use a decent Xeon x3540(I need to buy one of these..).



GPUs at 850/950, 1.525vcore, 1.325vtt, 2.1vdimm(using micron D9GTS), and the CPU at -118 to -119 Celsius



GPUs at 822/950, 1.525vcore, 1.325vtt, 2.1vdimm, and the CPU at -119 to -120 Celsius throught game tests and -125 to -126 through CPU test.

Not sure if we have enough nitrogen to try again today, want to hit 49k 3D05 and 37k 3D06

Whoa! ~5.4GHz is definitely sweet! But that's quite different from what I'm trying to do. Still my hat's off to ya...