Not that many of you won’t have heard of EVGA before today, but here’s a little introduction about the business and what their objectives are.

EVGA do have what seems to be a sort of ‘cult’ following, with many praising their customer service and Step-Up programme. Recently, they have expanded their motherboard range to include models aimed at the extreme overclocker, after they took on Peter “Shamino” Tan to help in the design.

Their X58-based Classified boards were widely accepted to be ‘the best’ X58 boards available, by quite a large margin. The price of such a high quality and well-performing board was always going to be high, but the sheer potential made it an extremely attractive option to all the extreme overclockers.

Specifications:

Performance

• Based on Intel P55 chipset
• Supports Intel Socket 1156 Processors

Memory

• 4 x 240-pin DIMM sockets
• Dual Channel DDR3
• Maximum of 16GB of DDR3 2600MHz+

Expansion Slot

• 5 x PCIe x16/x8, 1 x PCIe x4, 1 x PCIe x10 x 32-bit PCI, support for PCI 2.1

Storage I/O

• 8 x Serial ATA 300MB/sec with support for RAID 0, RAID1, RAID 0+1, RAID5, JBOD

Integrated Peripherals

• 8 Channel High Definition
• 2 x 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet

Multi I/O:

• 1 x PS2 Keyboard
• 13 x USB2.0 ports (7 external + 6 internal headers)
• Audio connector (Line-in, Line-out, MIC)
• FireWire

Form Factor:

• EATX Form Factor

Features:

• DPHS – Double Play Heatsink Support
• 10+2 Phase Digital PWM using Volterra VT1185S MOSFETs
• EVGA Vdroop Control
• EVGA Dummy OC
• EVGA E-LEET Tuning Utility
• EVGA EZ Voltages read points
• Onboard Clear CMOS, Power and Reset Buttons
• 300 More Socket Gold + Low ESR/ESL Film Cap
• LICC Capacitors
• Onboard CPU Temp Monitor
• Passive Chipset Heatsink
• Triple BIOS Support
• Solid State Capacitors
• Dual Clock Generators
• EVGA Show-Volt
• EVGA ECP V2 Support
• PCIe Disable Jumpers
• EVGA EVbot Support

That’s a pretty long list of specifications. A notable mention for the DPHS, or Double Play Heatsink support which allows both LGA1156 and LGA775 heatsinks to be used. Also extra attachments like the EVGA Show-Volt, EVGA ECP V2 and EVGA EVbot all aim to make extreme overclocking that little bit easier.

Packaging

The box is a fairly standard affair, packed full of the bundled accessories.

The Board

With the exception of the P55 Micro, this is the only board in the P55 range to feature the red and black colour scheme; It also sports an anodised black  LGA1156 socket.  Underneath the PCI-E slots, there is power and reset buttons which double as LED’s for power and HDD activity. Next to these button’s, there the switch to select one of the 3 BIOS’s. The board also has dual clockgens, the one just above the NF200 chip ends with 139AKLF. Lastly, above the ATX power connector is the EVGA Show-Volt.

Video Tour:

And as this board has so many features to cover, I even needed a “Part 2″.

BIOS

Here’s pretty much everything in the BIOS in a logical order from top left Standard features, through to Frequency/Voltage Control, stepping down through each menu each time.

Test System:

EVGA P55 Classified 200 motherboard
Intel Core i7 870 B1 Stepping
2GB A-DATA Vitesta Extreme Edition DDR3-1600 7-7-7-20
nVidia Geforce 9500GT
Antec TPQ-1KW

LittleDevil CPU Pot
Dry Ice

Tests and Results:

CPU-Z:

http://valid.canardpc.com/show_oc.php?id=795587

SuperPi 1M:
182.5 x 27 = 4928Mhz
BenchTec #1

Pifast:
183 x 27 = 4942Mhz
BenchTec #1

SuperPi 32M:
178 x 27 = 4807Mhz
BenchTec #1

wPrime 32M:
197.5 x 24 = 4740 Mhz

wPrime 1024M:
Sadly, I ran out of time for wPrime 1024M. Here’s a run on air at 190 bclk limited by voltage and temps.

Usage:

One thing I like to do when I review a board is to talk a bit about how the board is to use. It’s my way of trying to convey all those aspects of using a motherboard that you don’t get from just screenshots and pictures.

First up, the board didn’t like my Corsair Dominator 1866C9 1.65v DDR3 set. I suspect this is just an issue with my kit as I’ve not tested them with my other X58 or P55 boards and when I put my older Kingston or A-DATA DDR3 kits in the board, all of the issues went away.

There is quite a lot to learn with the BIOS, with a handful of very useful extensions to the standard AMI BIOS that EVGA have included. The ‘Auto’ settings are actually pretty good and will give you a good start. The good thing with the Auto settings is that the motherboard reports what voltage the Auto settings have chosen in the BIOS screens next to the options. This allows you to give the Auto settings a chance without worrying how high the board is pushing the voltages to achieve the overclock.

I wanted to show you all how the EVGA Show-Volt and ECP V2 features worked, so I made another video and put it on YouTube here.

Conclusion

Clearly, this is a motherboard with a very specific target audience. The board screams ‘extreme overclocker’ and anyone else will struggle to justify the extra cost over the P55 FTW boards. While the price is high, this board isn’t just a recycled design of the rest of the range, it’s specifically designed with the extra features and higher quality components in mind.

With recent studies showing that PCI-E2.0 slots running at 8x speed achieve 95-99% of the performance of full 16x speed, this board is a serious contender for multi-GPU setups as well as those after the ultimate LGA1156 CPU overclocking platform.

EVGA boards are backed by a large community and very good support in terms of product warranty and BIOS updates while the bundled EVGA E-leet software makes pushing that little bit further in Windows easy and guarantees those last few Mhz.

While the price and performance put it dangerously close to a LGA1366/X58-based setup, I predict that we will see quite a lot more of this motherboard when Intel’s 32nm Clarkdale dual-core CPU’s arrive. These CPU’s could have the potential to wipe the floor with benchmarks that are not dependant on multi-core and this board could well provide the ideal platform for many world records. This combination could be the new E8600 with Pifast and  both SuperPi’s, as well as 3D benchmarks like Aquamark and 3DMark01.