Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
EVGA Classified X58 Motherboard, The Star of the Show!, May 23, 2009
This is going to be a "mini-review" of the E760-A1 Classified Motherboard by our favorite silicon-sandwich maker, EVGA. Believe it or not Amazon.com gave me a deal on this "mainboard" or I'd still be staring at a standard EVGA BL-132-X58 3 x SLI Motherboard, and not this pretty Classified baby that's inside of my newest PC right now. So, thanks to Amazon.com, for making a bad thing right and taking care of business with me and the Classified.
I actually want to thank them a LOT for turning me onto this beautiful sculpture that's inside my HAF 932 "highly mod'd" PC since yesterday at about 9AM PST, because this is The Kind, as we say in Hawaii. Actually, it's Da Kine, which is KUHL, KUHL, KUHL! The most striking visual appeal of this board is the awesome black and red finish to *everything* there is, ie the theme is repeated from the DIMM slots, to the PCI-Express slots, to the CPU area, it's all mirrored in visually stunning graphics, colors, and finished, blackout Chrome metal, and a mirror-finished motherboard itself. Like WOW! Visually it's a 20+ on a 10-Scale, it just jumps out at you and says, "I am Class, and you may as well call me by my real name, 'Classified' before I whack you up side of da head!"
The board has *presence*, and features that beget a much better review than I am going to make tonight. All told, I have been up perhaps the better part of two days getting the new PC all gussied up in new Duds, including this beautiful thing, and my judgment and wit are on the wane, right about now...or I'd seriously get into the dialectics of the huge electronic masterpiece that this motherboard is. But I won't just now, promising to come back to this review and update it with impressions after a week, a month, heck, whenever I feel like it if you don't mind!
Wavey Davey gives this motherboard his solid 5-Stars ***** across the board, and I'll mention just a couple coup's that the board has that others do not:
1)There are 4 Full-Length 16/8 x Lane PCI-Express Slots, actually 5 (yes, that would be five!) with the single-lane slot for something like your X-Fi Fatal1ty Pro Sound Blaster card, like that...actually it's there for you to run, of course, Quad-SLI mode, if nothing else! How about that gamers? You could potentially, if you had enough power supply "firepower" and cables, (you'd need a minimum of a Kilowatt PSU to do this! [1000-Watts or higher!!])ie run 4 x 2 PSU-6-pin connectors to 4 matching cards, or rather 3 matching cards for gaming and that sort of deal (God forbid the scores with 3 cards in SLI mode!), and a 4th video card for "normal pursuits" like Folding@Home, doing Phys-X stuff, things like that.
2) Then there's the Custom Cooled North Bridge, I believe it's called (I'll research it and come back and change this if it's the South Bridge, hah-hah!). That black-anodized piece with an intricate and effective cooling heat sink setup looks so stealthy, and Darth-Vaderish, in all it's glory on the motherboard, that it will scare off heat! Well, would that it could...would be nice if it could, yah? And ON that North Bridge is a magically "glowing" LED "E" in EVGA Speak, the biggest, and baddest eletric LED graphical interface I've ever seen on a motherboard of anybody's making! WOW! It just looks positively stunning at night, or in a darkened room, to look inside your PC and see the "Glowing E" of EVGA, all nice and cozy on your motherboard. Nobody has that, for sure! This is unique!
3) The "running lights" in the Classified are also color-keyed along the company line, with a "red" ON button, normally it's green right? But not with this item, guys and gals! Red is "ON" and red is Good, so don't get confused and think that your motherboard is posting bad things and call Tech Support over at EVGA with a dire request for an explanation of this phenomenon...which looks Tres KUHL, like everything else about this motherboard does! It's just first class, and All First Class, from point to point, feature to feature, vs all the other boards for sale now.
Of course, the motherboard has the usual fare from EVGA, like the Digital Post Board at the lower, front edge of the board, conveniently located there for your perusal, and it will tell you the temp of the CPU at any given time, after full boot is made good, and up to then it's giving up all kinds of Post Codes, which are explained fully in the back of the rather massive "owners manual" that comes with the board. The "Activity Light" is Amber to Yellow-colored, so that's also a new wrinkle! At least the "Clear CMOS" button is still familiar Red, well, of course, it would be Red, right? Right!
The motherboard comes with a host of cables and things, a bunch of SLI-enabling cables for multiple Video Cards, different types of SLI (I later learned there are several(!) modes: SLI-2, SLI-3, and SLI-3 w/4th video card for Phys-X, FAH, or another monitor!). There are SATA cables, and otherwise some Molex connectors for your collection of fans and gadgets inside the case, something to help organize the deal so it won't look like a trash heap of wires in there!
There's also a Chrome-satin finish care portal arrangement, I believe it's called something particularly fitting, ie it's called the I/O Shield... It's the place where all the USB, FireWire, Ethernet, RJ-45, and other ports like PS2 ports, are, on the so-called back of the case....that's what they furnish you. There's also a combo FireWire and USB port gadget, which can be placed in any open PCI slot (like if you're a true aficionado you're going to HAVE a clear or open PCI slot...don't think so! at least not in mine anyway).
I will caution those of you with an eSATA port in the front of your PC, like I have with my HAF 932, that you will NOT be able to hook up that port normally, shall we say, with the Classified, if you plan on utilizing that single lane-PCI Express slot, AND the adjacent PCI-Express full-length 16X Lane slot plus the flat-motherboard SATA connector. There is no way in Hades that you can put two cards of any persuasion there, and still have the connector free for the SATA part of your front panel, so I had to Pasadena on using that Single-Lane PCI-Express port for my X-Fi Titanium Sound Blaster Fatal1ty Pro Card, and front panel for that matter! It would have been nice there, the my front eSATA port is very, very important to me because I've got some eSATA external equipment that I like to use with the PC, and I NEEDED THAT PORT hooked up!
Alternatively, you can hook up that front eSATA/SATA port to the regular motherboard SATA connectors, and NOT use that particular motherboard SATA connection, and then use all 5 PCI-Express Slots for whatever purposes you wish, end of that story! EVGA has it all covered, trust me.
That's about it for my 1st impressions of this total KNOCKOUT and DRAG ME DOWN motherboard. It is so visually stunning you will not believe it goes in the bottom of your computer! Crazy!! I love it, I mean my PC is stylin' like never before tonight, Gosh Darn It! Why did they have to make it so pretty, anyway?
Of course I didn't mention this one's No.1 purpose in all of the above gadgets, and stuff! It's meant for the Intel i7 "Nehalem" CPU, and all of the OVERCLOCKING possible, all you could do, and THEN SOME, because there are things to do to your CPU with this board that I wouldn't dream of telling Intel, for fear of warranty banishment! This is the Overclocker's Dream, if there ever was one, so come one, come all, it's the E-760 EVGA Classified for you if you want to overclock unlike any other overclocker on your street!
Come get it, this is the one!
Wavey Davey 5-23-2009
ADDENDUM, 6-29-2009
A couple things that comes to mind with this setup which I have learned to love, that I didn't mention with the above "mini-review" which was written hastily, under the influence of a lack of sleep, ie before I had time to actually experience all of the blessings that the Classified bestows on its owners:
1) ELEET, aka E-LEET Tuning Utility
This is something that you've got to use to truly appreciate, and only time and your creativity stops miracles from happening with it punched up in the control center, your desktop! ELEET allows for fine tuning, ie adding additional overclocking parameters to your initial overclock just to make things more stable, push the "envelope" higher than it already is, by adjusting virtually *all* of the important Voltage and Frequency adjustments available with Classified. Let me give an example:
Let's say you boot up to a 4167Mhz overclock, dialing in 19 X 219 QPI, but your real goal is 4257Mhz. Small things make all the difference in the world doing this sort of thing, and here's where ELEET comes into play...
Open ELEET, "Voltages" tab, where you can increase VCore a minute (minoot!) amount, CPU VTT Voltage an equally minute amount, then go to the "Overclocking" tab. Hit the Increase Mhz tab ten (10) little clicks, and BAM! Instantly after hitting "Apply Selection" things rock, and roll, for a second or two as the computer's hardward is "adjusted" by ELEET, you're at 4257Mhz, the elusive goal is reached!
ELEET is the only hardware overclocking utility built into the GUI in any computer/motherboard/CPU tandem that I know of, and it's very, very effective...so there you go, another EVGA 1st, first on the block, first at the race, and there at the finish to hand you the trophy!
2) North Bridge, South Bridge, motherboard features unique to Classified
The North Bridge and South Bridge in the Classified put the pedal to the metal so to speak, they are the operating hardware features of this board that distinguish it from all others. Without...
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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Very empressed with performance, October 19, 2009
I have to say that I am very empressed with the Evga classified X58 motherboard. After arriving in Trinidad and Tobago on 3rd August 2009, a week after it was bought online, I assembled it in a Coolmaster CM 690 case with 6 gb of 1333 Ghz OCZ ram, XFX geforce 8400 graphics card ( All I could of gotten at short notice with the little change I had left over), Corsair 1000 watts power supply, Core I7 920, 500 GB hard drive and Lite on DVD burner. When I first turn on the PC, with out the operating system installed, it booted up or posted successfully. I then installed Vista Ultimate operating sysem, which was a smooth process, with no issues. After installing all the drivers, virus programs etc, I ran Fallout 3, Need for speed most wanted and Bioshock and it ran smooth with no problems.
One issue I had was that with Vista, I could not use the two RJ45 Ethernet network ports to share the internet between my cable modem and another computer, no matter how much updates I did on my drivers and OS. This issue was later solved after installing windows 7. It took me a while to find a way to fit this big motherboard in a mid tower but after unscrewing the plastic cable Guides, the motherboard fit perfect. It looks as if the CM690 mid tower case was made for this motherboard. Even after running Resident evil 5 and Devil may cry 4, on Windows 7, the computer gave me no issues with drivers or viruses or computer crashes. The Bios boot up sequence has a very professional look and feel, with the very defined text. I compared it with my friend's MSI AM2+ 790fx platinum boot up screen and I have to say that it cant compete. Every thing about the motherboard from the way it was packaged, the layout of the motherboard, and how it performed was very professional. There is great spacing of the PCI express slots on the board. It was easy to update the drivers of the computer from the Evga website. I would have liked it very much, if they had a lighted back plate like the Asus rampage 2 extreme.
I have not tried overclocking yet to find out how stable the board really is, but that is in development. Unlike so many reviews I have read about the Asus rampage 2 extreme and the MSI X58 eclipse having posting problems, The Evga classified had shown me that it works straight out of the box. I recommend this board to anyone who want X58 performance without the headache, especially if you are not a computer nerd.
Ohh gosh this review is long so let me take this time to big up the workers at amazon for getting my computer goods to me in record time, and treating me like VIP. I had sent my first motherboard to the wrong address, but Amazon, made the changes and sent another motherboard to the right address at no extra cost. These people know about customer service. I will definitely continue shopping with Amazon.com. I still have to stop borrowing my friends monitor and buy my own and also buy 2 GTX 295.
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