eVGA p55 Classified 200 review - Final Words & Conclusion

Final Words & Conclusion

[conclusion] Sexy ! [/conclusion] Aaah if conclusions could only be as simple as inserting Forum tags. Euhm, yeah so it's not exactly a secret or difficult to understand and grasp idea that eVGA's P55 Classified 200 is for the l33t, the extreme geeks, the uber hardcore PC aficionado's and the professional overclockers. Everything on this board was designed with one goal in mind -- reaching the absolute maximum performance. It could be the mother of all motherboards for the enthusiast end-users.

Personally I adore this motherboard, the looks and the feature set. The diverse options could pleasure you as similar as a nice blonde women could. Yes the P55 Classified 200 is a sexy piece of hardware really.

The eVGA's P55 Classified 200 however is not for everyone, no Sir make no mistake. Only that small elite small group of tweakers, overclockers and benchmarkers (and tech editors) would benefit from a motherboard like this. The rest of the gang really should buy a more affordable product as the 350 USD price tag is just too steep for a P55 motherboard, I simply can not justify the price in any way or manner.

Next to that the 'normal' users will miss out on some regular features -- the standard PCI ports, perhaps even more SATA ports, better audio integration (eVGA why no optical TOSLINK in the analog audio connector block?) and well .. some more common features. But the flipside of the coin is simple, this motherboard was not designed for regular usage whatsoever, and that's the sheer reality here.

It's for the aficionado's like yours truly .. and it really doesn't get any better than this. I mean we got a Core i7 870 processor running at 4.2 GHz on a fairly standard air-cooler. Next to the tremendous overclocking potential of course a primary feature of the P55 Classified 200 is the ability to run 3-Way SLI + PhysX or even Quad CrossFireX through the use of its five PCI-E 2.0 16X slots. Most P55 motherboards support two PCI-E 2.0 16X slots limiting SLI and CrossFireX to two video cards.

The P55 Classified 200 gets part of its name thanks to the usage of the NVIDIA NF200 chip that is embedded on this motherboard. This NF200 chip provides additional PCI-E lanes thus opening up the 3-Way SLI and QuadFire capability, we do wonder though .. adding additional PCIe lanes with the NF200 is great, but at the end of the pipeline there's only so much bandwith available towards the processor which might be a bottleneck for massive graphics card configurations.

That aside, the little extra's .. a digital volt-meter integrated with the motherboard - three BIOSes selectable by switch - seven fully controllable fan headers -- Onboard power, reset and CMOS clear buttons -- best quality component usage/selection -- intrinsic intense BIOS features -- S775 mounting holes --  PCI-E Disable jumpers -- 2600Mhz DDR3 (via overclock) -- 2x8pin 600W CPU Power -- and the list goes on and on.

Small note on the integrated digital volt-meter. I love the idea, but the usage of a contact cable seems a bit unwarranted -- perhaps in a future update simply make use of a little switch after which you can select and display say voltage on the VDIMM or CPU core ? Just a thought though; as we do love the integration.

But let me wrap it up, the eVGA's P55 Classified 200 is perfect in it's genre and obviously intended for a very small target audience -- so bring on the LN2 sub-zero cooling or at the very least liquid cooling, and you will have a perfect date with a near perfect piece of hardware. It's so good to see companies design hardware like shown today. We have much respect for a grand motherboard like this. If you match the target audience for a product like this, then we can recommend it very much.

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