EVGA X79 Classified E779 Motherboard Pictured At GeForce LAN 6

The EVGA X79 Clasified Motherboard

EVGA is one of the sponsors of GeForce LAN 6 and they just got done doing a presentation where they showed off one of the companies upcoming Intel X79 Express motherboards for the yet to be released Sandy Bridge-E CPU.

We were told by EVGA that they would be launching three Intel X79 boards when the LGA2011 socket launches. They told us that all three of the boards would be made available when Intel launches the platform. This is big for EVGA as they were late to market with both the Intel P67 and Intel Z68 platforms. EVGA is looking at this launch as a fresh start for the motherboard team. The three boards that are going to be available at launch are:

• EVGA x79 SLI – E775
• EVGA X79 FTW – E777
• EVGA X79 Classified – E779

The motherboard that was shown at NVIDIA’s GeForce LAN 6 was the flagship board, the EVGA X79 Classified (part number E779).

The EVGA E779 motherboard has four memory slots for quad-channel memory support, which is fairly common on this platform from what we can tell. Some boards will have eight, but they will be in the minority at launch. EVGA ran a live demo on the board and used the Intel RTS2011LC CPU Water Cooler on the system.

The layout of the EVGA X79 Classified looks pretty clean and it features the standard red and black motif.

The EVGA X79 Classified motherboard rear I/O panel has a total of eight USB 3.0 ports! The board appears to be using VIA Labs ‘VLI’ controllers for SuperSpeed USB 3.0. Also on the back panel you can see that there is a single PS2 port, CMOS reset button, two ESATA ports, two Gigabit NICs, and 8 channel HD analog audio connectors. The small black connector is for the bundled EVBot and of course Bluetooth.

The EVGA Classified X79 motherboard has a total of five PCI Express 3.0 ready x16 slots that are properly spaced for use with some of the video cards that take up two or three slots.

EVGA has the usual power/reset buttons along one of the boards edges and nine contact points for overclockers to use.

The SAS ports are long gone, but you have two SATA III headers and four SATA II headers for storage and optical devices. The blue header along the edge of the board is a USB 3.0 header for a front panel.

EVGA looks to have some solid Intel X79 boards coming out! We can’t wait to get them on the test bench!