EVGA E761 X58 SLI Classified Motherboard

EVGA E761 X58 Classified

EVGA in the past has been an Nvidia only company, utilizing Nvidia reference designs for their boards. Their first notable departure was the EVGA 790i FTW and subsequent 790i FTW Digital. With Intel locking down chipset options for Core i7 to just their X58 northbridge and ICH10R southbridge, EVGA has designed their own custom board. This custom board has the highest price for any Intel X58 Express powered motherboard at $399 shipped, but has features designed for extreme performance and overclocking.

Most motherboards feature 4 to 6 phase CPU power regulation and maybe 2 phase memory power regulation if you are lucky. The EVGA X58 Classified comes equipped with 10 phase power regulation for the CPU and 3 phase for the memory, providing the most stable power during overclocking. In addition to this there are other features that facilitate overclocking such as PCIe slot disabling switches, remote CPU vCore adjustments, and a BIOS centered around overclocking.

The last EVGA board I touched was the 790i Digital FTW. The Classified packaging has stepped up the level of packaging. The box looks.. slick!

The accessories all come smoothly bagged up. You've got your PCI bracket mounted USB/Firewire ports, solid SLI bridges, an installation guide, a manual, and hard drive cables.

The ECP is an external control board that lets the end-user control some rudimentary aspects of the board. You can power on and reset the board, reset the CMOS, manipulate the PCIe slot connectivity, monitor the POSt process via the 80 port LED, and use the three switches to increase CPU vCORE by +0.1v per jumper.

I have to give it up to EVGA; the E761 Classified looks like it is worth $399 shipped. The black and red color scheme with the black PCB just exudes a menacing aura; hopefully the board holds up to its price tag and sleek color scheme.

The DIMM slots are powered by a 3-phase PWM. To the right of the DIMM slots are 9 copper pads that let the end-user measure various voltages directly such as vcore and vtt. To the left of the 24-pin power connector are a series of jumpers. These jumpers let the end-user completely disable various PCIe slots, which is very useful when benching and you want to disable a graphic card.

The southbridge of the board is plastered with a rather large heatsink, some USB headers, a PORT 80 LED readout, and an extensive pinout to be used with the ECP.

The PCIe layout is designed around enabling triple-sli with double-width cards while having 1 free slot for a single PCIe x16 and PCIe x1 slot. With all 4 slots populated, bandwidth is split to 8x per slot.




The 10-phase digital PWM has been specially designed for extreme overclocking. Two +12v EPS connectors are wired into the CPU pwm to provide up to 600w of power. To improve signal and power stability EVGA has increased the gold content within the socket to facilitate making the best connection to the CPU.

The IO panel has a large number of input and output options. For output there is an optical and a coaxial SPDIF connector and 6 audio jacks. For input there are 8 USB 2.0 ports, a FireWire 800 port, an eSATA port, and two gigabit ports. The little red button by the optical port is a CMOS clear switch.

In addition to all actual hardware designed for overclocking, EVGA has their eLEET utility which supports software manipulation of every voltage on the board along with QPI base clock and PCIe manipulation. In addition to this, the eLEET utility lets you monitor these voltages, monitor memory and CPU frequencies, and the ability to store 10 frequency and voltage profiles. This can be quite useful when overclocking at the limits of your processor; I have a profile for 3DMark2003 and 2005 benchmarking and another profile for 3Dmark2006 and Vantage benchmarking.

Below is a short bullet list showing the board features. If you'd like more information check out EVGA's product page for the X58 E761 Classified.

Key Features

USB 2.0 Support

PCI Express 2.0/1.1 Support

Serial ATA - II (SATA2)

Solid Capacitors

Passive Heatsink

On-Boad Clear CMOS Button

On-Board Power Button with Integrated Power Light

On-Board Reset Button with Integrated HDD Activity Light

On-Board Diagnostics LED Readout

2-Way SLI Support

3-Way SLI Support

Windows XP Support

Windows Vista Support

DDR3 Memory Support

Triple-Channel DDR3 Memory Support

Intel X58/ICH10R Chipset

Intel Core i7 Processor Support

10 Phase Digital PWM

300% more gold content in the CPU socket

Super-low ESR and ESL film capacitors

Delivers up to 600w of CPU Power