EVGA's Monster Board Revealed
"EVGA showcases a massive dual socket LGA1366 motherboard at this year's CES."
Published: 8th January 2010 | Source: TechReaction |
EVGA has had enthusiasts drooling ever since they dropped a snapshot of a pair of LGA1366 sockets on their Twitter page at the end of last year. Captioned, "The Future," the post indicated more would be revealed at this year's CES convention. Well now that time has come, and EnJoY of TechReaction got an exclusive first look at the board, the Classified 270-GT-W555.
General design features include a 3-phase power design for each bank of memory slots and all solid-state capacitors, chokes, and PCB. The seven PCIe x16 slots are powered by a pair of NF200 chips for the possibility of quad SLI. The board also sports a pair of SATA 6Gbps and USB 3.0 ports utilizing a Marvell controller. To house all of this, the board is an extended, wider version of the XL-ATX form factor seen in the Classified X58 4x SLI board.
Perhaps the most intriguing feature of the board is its processor capabilities. Unlike most other dual socket boards, the 270-GT-W555 is able to run its two processors at different multipliers. In fact, the processors don't even have to be of the same model!
This statement has led many enthusiasts to hope that the board could perhaps run on current desktop i7 processors (particularly the 920) rather than being constrained to the usual server-centric Xeon X5000 series. However, due to the constraints seen in current dual socket setups/technologies, this is questionable at best. Even the statement taken at face value has been met with some skepticism.
Now with all of these features and possible hardware, rigs running on this board will need some serious juice. In a seemingly excessive fashion, the board sports not only a pair of the usual 8-pin motherboard connectors but also three 6-pin connectors and two 4-pin floppy connectors. Thankfully, it seems that only the 8-pin connectors are needed for general use, with the others simply providing additional stability for extreme clocking situations.
EVGA hopes to bring this out around April (pending BIOS tweak time) with a price range of $450-550. However, seeing as current Classified boards are already reaching into this range, it's a bit hard to imagine that this will really come to pass.
Most Recent Comments
Pro: something they did that was great
Mediocre: ordered it - got it - simple, nothing to report
con: bad stuff
Cept it'd be really hard to mechanic without having it open for abuse.
It sounds like a subforum that will need a considerable amount of moderator attention and leave much scope for disagreement.
Surely posting about messed up orders serves a purpose as we can then assess how the company rectified the issue and obviously if there are numerous negative posts it will paint a picture.
The reason I suggested that the companys be invited to have a representative was so they could defend themselves against such accusations etc and effectively moderate themselves. If it is hard to get them involved then its not a neccessity, however I thought it would be in their best interests to get involved.
And I think the community on here is such that the users that frequent the forum can to an extent moderate the section and will obviously not abuse the thread.
I honestly dont think the small talk section is the right place for the thread. All the parts OC3D review have to be purchased from somewhere, personally speed of service, customer service and RMA procedures etc are equally as important as the cost of the item itself!
Seems to be a demand.... :)
Perhaps my original title was misleading.
maybe "Retailer customer experience forum" or similar would be more relevant.
If U create a thread in Off Topic (for arguments sake), one of the mods makes it sticky, and as the OP U then have editing rights for the OP.
Below that, members can post experiences of stores where u can collate them at the top.
Disclaimers can be made if u want to go down that road, that this is merely a member's experience of online etailers etc etc.. not officially attached to OC3D.
U could call the thread "Member's retailer customer experience thread", and chose to add the comments of members that are perhaps over a certain number of posts to keep the espammers shut up.
Each member can reply to the thread, making a PRO/MEDI/CON experience, and u can merely add to the OP, e.g.:
Blam PCS
PRO:
MEDI: Rastalovich (link to the reply within the thread)
CON:
P/M/C pretty much as I said above.
Over time, if the thread proves interesting, maybe something can come of it. Otherwize it'll turn into tumbleweed and the mods can unsticky it.
Run it past staff and see if it's possible. Cos if u don't get the sticky, it'll probably goto tumbleweed quicker.
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