EVGA E761 X58 SLI Classified Motherboard Review

By chris June 25, 2009

Overclocking Results

To kick things off, I decided I’d try what I’ve always had trouble with on previous boards: booting into Windows at 220bclk. This was done on the box cooler and with minimal tweaking done in the BIOS.

Quite surprised, I decided to start benching the chip. Unfortunately, I was thermally limited to around 3.8GHz due to only owning the box cooler that came with the chip. To kick things up a bit I decided to pull out the mini cascade and give the board a whirl. Click the images for the full screenshot.

EVGA E761 X58 Classified 32.9k 3Dmark 2006

Unfortunately, I don’t have a very good Core i7 920; its max base clock is 242MHz. With a Xeon w3540 I expect all the benchmarks to be stable at an additional 300Mz if not more. This was all accomplished with IHS temperatures around -80 Celsius, a little colder than what is possible with dry ice. That being said I was able to mimic all of these results on dry ice with a Koolance CPU-LN2 pot and even run SuperPi 32M at 5GHz after a little tweaking. The EVGA E761 X58 Classified in combination with a little cold turns even a mediocre Core i7 920 into an overclocking beast.

Just to give you an idea, the Core i7 965, a C0 revision processor, was hitting these speeds on LN2 on a good day, while the Core i7 920 D0 revision processor when combined with the EVGA E761 Classified does this all day long. For the price of a 965 you can purchase a Classified and a Xeon w3540 for $609 shipped or an Core i7 950, which will walk all over the Core i7 965. The Classified really unlocked the potential in these Core i7 processors.

Writer’s Note: After completing the overclocking segment I found a guide by Shamino, one of if not the man responsible for the Classified. The guide discusses the various voltage and timing settings that can make the difference between a successful and unsuccessful experience with the Classified.

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