EVGA X58 SLI review - Introduction

If there's one technology that impressed me the most this year, it has to be Intel's Core i7 release. To this date I am still stunned by it's performance. It's so good that starting from Q1 2009, all test systems in the Guru3D lab will be Core i7 based until something better comes along. I'm that excited about the technology!

What's a little less exciting is that Intel only has one chipset available for for the Core i7 series processors, making the upgrade pretty expensive. However, this is an enthusiast user product. Targeted at the same enthusiast user that would purchase say a nForce 790 Ultra SLI and QX9770 processor. When you look at it from that point of view the Core i7 upgrade path doesn't look so hideously expensive anymore as in fact, if you purchase a 299 Core i7 920 processor and a decent 299 USD X58 motherboard .. you'll be going much faster than the QX9770 system I just mentioned, and you have the ability to go both ATI and NVIDIA multi GPU wise, which is a great flexibility to have.

Of course you need to plant DDR3 memory on this motherboard as well, 3 DIMMS recommended, but two give gruesomely fast performance as well. It's suffice to say that the Core i7 combo is fast .. extremely fast. And therefore we have been covering all related Core i7 products a lot. Up-to this point we tested two Core i7 processors, a Core i7 Multi-GPU performance article and no less than four X58 motherboard reviews.

Today we'll test the fifth X58 motherboard in a row, this time from the folks at eVGA. They recently released their eVGA X58 SLI motherboard loaded with features. Tagged with a 299 USD sales price this motherboard seem to be very impressive. But since it's eVGA, they decided that this motherboard should be all about overclocking, and nothing else.

So hypothetically, if you were planning to purchase this product, pop in a Core i7 processor and leave things as they are .. well, you'd be wasting money really. In this article we'll show you why that is. We'll cover the motherboard from A to Z, and to spice it up a little I'll slap on some water-cooling and overclock our processor towards 4.2 GHz, stable.

That should be fun right? Have a peek at the motherboard and browse onwards to the next page please.