EVGA E761 X58 SLI Classified Motherboard Review

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.

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