EVGA x99 mATX and Classified Photos

We have two photo's of EVGAs pending Intel x99 chipset based mATX and Classified motherboards. Below the fold you can check out a photo of the upcoming products with showing the black design quad PCB, buttons and a diagnostic LED. The mATX will retail for roughly $250 while the Classified is expected to sell at a whopping $400 (USD). 

X99 is developed for the 6 and 8-core DDR4 supporting Haswell-E HEDT platform and is based on socket LGA2011-3.The motherboards based on X99 can support a whopping five PCI-Express 3.0 x16 which can be arranged in these slot configurations, x16/NC/x16/NC/x8, or x16/NC/x8/x8/x8 and yeah, even x8/x8/x8/x8/x8.  X99 will bring a whopping 10-port SATA 6 Gb/s storage controller supporting RAID RST and SRT and SSD TRIM on RAID 0 configurations.

The EVGA x99 mATX offers the x16 slots, a mini M.2. connector and four DIMM slots. The board has a power-on and reset button as well as a post diagnostic LED and six SATA3 6Gbps ports.

The classified has more or less the same features yet five x16 and one x4 slot, 10 SATA3 ports, eight DIMM slots, two M.2. slots and then the regulars including some extra voltage leads and micro-switches to en/disable PCI Express slots.

The boards should get dark I/O covers and the aluminum heatpipe in the Classified are anodized black for the retail models. After looking at the boards I do like the dark color schema, unfortunately both motherboards are cluttered with red colored capacitors which kind of spoils the looks a bit. Totally dark caps would have been the way to go really as this is busy on the eyes. Overall the boards look a little plain really, but some like that yet others loathe it.

It is interesting to see X99 launch with Classified branding, the previous X79 series from EVGA caught a lot of heat. If you look and search a little in their forums then you'll notice people are discussing whether or not that is a wise decision given the previous X79 problems. The X79, especially Classified edition EVGA boards series have had a good nukber of hardware issues and failures, BIOS issues and a lot of DOAs, bent pins and thus RMAs. It seems that ever since Shamino left the EVGA motherboard team for ASUS their motherboard team has had a hard time to keep up with development. In all fairness though, their Z97 series was pretty solid. But we'll have to wait and see how it pans out to be with their X99 line-up.