EVGA X58 SLI review - Photos - eVGA X58 SLI (2)

Here we run into the LGA 1366 socket for the Core i7 (Nehalem family) processor from Intel. As you can see proper heat-pipe based passive heatsinks are used to cool the MOSFETs surrounding the socket as well. The 8-pin CPU voltage pin header location in front of that passive heatsink BTW, a little inconvenient as the cooler is rather big.

This is what I like very much. The Intel reference board had only four DIMM slots which still puzzles me to date, but here we spot the six, thus no lame 3 or 4, DIMM slots for DDR3 1066/1333 memory, supporting up to 12GB of RAM through a 3-channel CPU integrated memory controller for a total memory bandwidth of 3200MB/s.

BTW you can also simply go for dual-channel configurations. The performance decrease is really not that bad at all. Make sure you use the green DIMM slots. We tried the black DIMM slots but that resulted in the motherboard not posting at all. I recommend eVGA to slap a sticker on there explaining users clearly to utilize the green slots.

Just below the memory we spot the ATX motherboard connector, 24 pins. And to the right the CPU fan header, which I find to be slightly far away from the processor. To the left again a fan header. The board has four in total.

When we move a little to the left we stumble into eight SATA II ports. To the right of the SATA ports we see the IDE/PATA header. All nicely horizontal positioned so it can not block long graphics cards. Extremely to the left of the SATA ports another two SATA ports.

Further upwards on the motherboard next to the PCIe x16 slot there is another SATA port. Making your HDD/SDD/Optical storage connectivity accumulate to 1 x UltraDMA133 (IDE connector) - 9 x Serial ATA 300MB/sec with support for RAID 0, RAID1, RAID 0+1, RAID5, JBOD.

RAID however is what I like to refer to as fake raid. 90% of the load is being dealt by your processor. So do not get the illusion this is hardware RAID at all please.

Here we can see the cooling solution a little more clearly. The Southbridge is passively cooled with the eVGA logo stamped in there. The Northbridge is cooled by a heatsink and active fan. It's quite inaudible, not bad at all really, plus it keeps temps at really good levels. The design overall looks very much like the nForce 780/790 boards.