Intel has dominated the CPU space recently with the launch of the Core 2 series and the Core i7 series of CPUs last year. The performance of these CPUs outstrips that of the fastest AMD CPU. To go along with the launch of the Core i7 Intel introduced a new series of motherboard chipsets called X58. X58 allowed motherboard manufacturers to include up to six DIMM Sockets instead of the four found on the older X48 chipset.

EVGA has released a few motherboards based upon NVIDIA and Intel motherboard chipsets over the last few years. They recently launched their X58 board, the X58 3X SLI Classified which is the motherboard I’m reviewing today. This is the first EVGA motherboard to support both Crossfire and SLI on the same board, due to the use of the X58 chipset. It should be an interesting review as every previous motherboard from EVGA has been NVIDIA based.

The EVGA motherboard is based upon the X58 chipset from Intel. The new Core i7 architecture brings several innovations to the Intel side of things including support for SLI, moving the memory controller onto the CPU from the Southbridge and a new interface for the CPU. The memory controller on the Core i7 is compatible with triple channel memory.

One of the big pushes with the X58 chipset is the support for SLI on the motherboard. Almost every X58 motherboard supports SLI, and boards that do not support SLI require a BIOS update to do so and then NVIDIA certification. The EVGA X 58 Classified boards supports 2-way and 3-way SLI. It also supports ATI’s Crossfire with up to three cards as well. Note that there are four PCI Express full-length slots on the motherboard, allowing for three NVIDIA cards plus a fourth card for PhysX.

The motherboard supports all of Intel’s Core i7 CPUs including the 965, 940 and 920 ones that are released. The board uses the X58 Northbridge in combination with the ICH10R Southbridge to offer high performance. As you might know the X58 chipset introduces the Quick Path Interconnect which replaces the Front Side Bus used in earlier Intel based motherboards and CPUs. QPI has a interconnect speed of up to 6.4Gigatransfers a second, or 4.8GT/s on the Core i7 940 and 920 CPUs. In previous Intel CPUs you took the multiplier and multiplied the FSB to get the clock speed. On Core i7 CPUs you take the multiplier and multiply it by the Base Clock speed of 133MHz to get the clock speed.. Thus a Core i7 965 has a multiplier of 24. Multiply the multiplier by 133MHz and you get the final clock speed of 3.2GHz. Memory speed is similarly determined by multiplying the BClk by the memory multiplier.