EVGA 55 Classified Motherboard

   The P55 chipset has been relegated to being the middle of the Intel motherboard chipset market with the X58 Express chipset being the high end and the H55 and Q57 chipsets being for the low end or integrated graphics support. The moving of the PCI Express lanes to the CPU means that the H55 and Q57 chipsets means they don’t need a Northbridge chip and use a PCH chip for the Southbridge functionality. 

   

















   EVGA is best known for their award winning NVIDIA based video cards. They have been in business over the last 11 years with a wide variety of computer hardware including video cards, motherboards, cooling solutions and other peripherals. EVGA launched their motherboard line with the release of the nForce 590 SLI series a while back. Today’s review is on the Intel P55 Classified 200 motherboards which are targeted at the extreme overclocker and tweaker. 

 Features:

• Support Intel Socket 1156 Processors
• Intel P55 Express chipset
• Support 2-way SLI plus PhysX and 3-Way SLI plus PhysX
• 4 DIMM Dual Channel DDR3 2600MHz up to 16GB
• 6 PCI Express graphics expansion slots
• 13 USB 2.0 PORTS
• 8 SATA II Ports
• 2 1394 Ports
• 2 Gigabit Ethernet ports
• 8-channel audio with S/PDIF and Coax
• 10+2 Phase PWM with swathing
• EGVGA Double Play heatsink
• EVGA Vdroop Control
• EVGA Dummy OC
• EVGA E-LEET Tuning Utility
• EVGA EZ voltage read points
• Onboard Clear CMOS, Power, and Reset buttons
• Onboard CPU Temperature Monitor
• 300% more gold content
• Passive chipset heatsink
• Triple BIOS
• 100% Solid State Capacitors
• Dual Clock Generators CPU and PCIe
• EVGA Show-Volt
• EVGA ECP V2 support
• PCIe Disable Jumpers
• EVGA EVbot support

Part Number	160-LF-E659-KR
Manufacturer	EVGA
Chipset	P55 Express
North Bridge	N/A
Socket	LGA-1156
Memory speed	2600 (OC)/2133 (OC)/1866 (OC)/1600 (OC)/1333/1066
Processor Types	Intel Core i7, Core i5, Core i3 LGA-1156
Number of CPUs	1
QPI	Up to 4.8GT/second
Memory Type	DDR3
Memory Channels	Double
Maximum Memory	16GB
External Graphics	PCI Express x16 x6
IGP	N/A
SCSI	None
SATA	3.0 GB/s
RAID	N/A
LAN	10/100/1000
Firewire	N/A
USB	USB 2.0
BIOS	AMIBIOS
Form Factor	ATX

  The P55 Classified 200 board from EVGA is as the name suggests based upon Intel’s P55 Express chipset. This was released in conjunction with the Core i7 LGA-1156 CPUs late last year. The EVGA board has an ICH10R Southbridge to go along with the P55 Northbridge. One thing that differentiates this board is that the CPU pins have 300% more gold content meaning that they will have better power delivery.

  EVGA’s board supports 2-way SLI plus PhysX and 3-way SLI plus PhysX. NVIDIA cards are the only one with official support for the physics in their hardware and this board is designed to take up to three dual slot video cards at one time plus another card for PhysX effects. The board has a NF200 bridge chip that takes 8 of the PCI Express lanes from the P55 chipset. To understand this feature we need to look at PCIe lanes.

   EVGA has a Dummy OC feature on this board. What this does it allows the user to overclock their system with the push of a button. To aid in the testing of the board there are onboard Clear CMOS, Power and Reset buttons on the board. There are also dual clock generators for the CPU and PCIE allowing for independent 

   The P55 chipset itself has 16 PCI Express lanes eight of those are taken up by the topmost PCI Express x16 slot when two or more video cards are installed in the video cards slots on the board the first card gets x8. The second PCI Express x16 slot gets x4 lanes from the PCH and the remaining four PCI Express slots get bandwidth split from the x8 remaining from the P55 chipset. In this way you could say the NF200 splits the bandwidth into x8/x4/x4 with x4 going to the 4th slot from the PCH. Or alternatively x8/x8/x4 with two NVIDIA cards and a PhysX card. Each of the PCIe slots can be disabled.

   The advent of having multiple BIOS by motherboard manufacturers has allowed for some piece of mind when updating BIOS as there is a backup BIOS to fall back to if one is corrupt. EVGA went a step further with the P55 Classified 200 by having three separate BIOS onboard, good for having a backup or when you want an OC profile to use with your system. The board has an onboard CPU Temperature monitor that uses the LED when in Windows. You can also use the Show Volt utility to show the voltage with the embedded Voltimeter. As I delve into the motherboard layout and bundle I will cover the other features of the board.

   Starting on the upper right hand corner of the board there are two yes two 8-pin power connectors for the CPU. Overclocker’s wanting to use the board to its fullest will want to connect two 8-pin power connectors to the board, but the board will work just fine with one connector. The two connectors are for the extreme overclocker’s that want to have the most power to the CPU and stability. The next item on the board is the two I-limit jumpers then the CPU Fan header.

    The Voltage Control Points are next. There are eight VCPs where you can measure the voltage of the CPU Vcore, the VTT, the memory, the PCH, the CPU PLL, and the ground. The CPU area is clear of obstacles, with plenty of room for large CPU coolers. One special feature of this board among many others is the CPU Cooler mounting holes. There are two sets of holes, one for LGA-1156 and the other for LGA-775 CPU coolers. This allows the use of either set and I was able to fit a large Thermaltake cooler with no issue. The next item is the Show Volt LED. Once the test probe is plugged in use the other end on the Voltage Control Points as indicated earlier and the board will show the voltage of the appropriate device. The next item is the 24-pin power connector. Note there is also a 4-pin Molex connector on top of the board, providing power and stability for when more than one video card is installed.

   The MOSFETs are covered by a heatsink/pipe combination that will cool the ten phase power PWMs and MOSFETs very well. The area where the Northbridge sits on most motherboards is where the heatsink for the NF200 chip that controls the PCIE lanes is located. The top of the heatsink has an EVGA logo which lights up and glows when the system is connected to a PSU. The P55 PCH is located in the normal spot for the Southbridge on this motherboard. There are four DIMM slots that take up to 16GB of DDR3 memory that can be clocked as high as 2600+ MHz if overclocked.

   There are six SATA ports on the board the maximum supported by the P55 Express PCH. The P55 Express PCH supports RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 and JBOD modes. Intel is not scheduled to support SATA 6 Gb/Second ports until 2011 but it does provide support for SATA 3 Gb/second and supports Intel’s Matrix Storage Technology and external SATA ports on this board. EVGA situates the SATA ports sideways in three groups of two, meaning that installing a video card will not interfere with installing a SSD or HDD.

   The onboard audio on the board is provided by the Realtek ALC889 CODEC that has been used in many motherboards on the market including this one. The ALC889 CODEC has support for multi-streaming 7.1+2 channel at the same time and Content Protection for lossless Blu-ray playback or HD-DVD playback. The ALC889 has high performance DACs with 108dB signal to noise ratio and ADCs with a 104dB SNR. There are ten DAC channels supporting 16/20/24-bit5 PCM format and three stereo ADCs supporting 16/20/24-bit PCM format. The Rear I/O on the board consists of a PS/2 keyboard port, six USB 2.0 ports, a combo ESATA/USB port, a PCIE connector for the ECP v2, two LAN jacks controlled by two Marvell PHYs, a Firewire port and six audio jacks for the onboard audio.