eVGA p55 Classified 200 review - Introduction

Here on Guru3D.com we already reviewed a lot of P55 motherboards, some mainstream, some budget and definitely a couple extraordinary ones. Today we look at a P55 motherboard in the extremely high-end range .. it's the all new eVGA P55 Classified 200. A board designed for the extreme overclockers a board for the uber enthusiast PC aficionado's.

P55 - for those that live under a rock, Intel recently launched three new processor. These processors come from the Nehalem family of processors and are classified with the codename 'Lynnfield'. To make some sense out of that, the 1st generation Core i7 processors had the codename Bloomfield.

Lynnfield processors are a small step down from that uber-high end Bloomfield based processor architecture.

The three most significant changes can be found in dual-channel memory, locked multipliers and lower TDP. Please read all about that in our Lynnfield processor review. Unfortunately the difference in-between Bloomfield and Lynnfield also entails a socket change, as such the really high-end Bloomfield processors like Core i7 920, 950 and 975 will be based on a Socket LGA 1366 design whereas the new Core i7 870, 860 and Core i5 750 processors will have to be seated onto Socket 1156. Chipset wise Bloomfield processors are paired with the X58 chipset from Intel, Lynnfield processors however will be paired with P55 chipset based motherboards. Overall the benefit of the P55/Lynnfield combo should be a better price performance ratio. Features wise on the motherboard side it all looks and feels fairly similar.

So to facilitate the new Lynnfield architecture processors Intel has been working on the P55 chipset, this chipset will replace P45. Lynnfield processors feature an integrated memory controller, like current Core i7 processors, and that they're outfitted with sixteen lanes of embedded PCI Express connectivity, there's no need to pair the processors with a second chip (Southbridge). Instead, the processor will connect only to the one P55 chip.

So there we are then, P55 motherboards. The motherboard we'll look into today is the absolute finest offering from eVGA  ... in all its ways a black and red  colored motherboard with a very nice feature set and then some more in the form of overclocking options, a tweakers wet dream really.

Have a peek at the motherboard, after which in the next page we'll dive into the review.