PCB Design and Functionality

Red and black colors make EVGA X58 SLI Classified mainboard look very serious and solemn. You really have to take a closer look in order to notice a number of very interesting technological solutions implemented on this mainboard.

As usual, let’s start with the top part of the mainboard PCB:

The digital ten-phase processor voltage regulator circuitry is topped with a heatsink that may only seem common. There is a heatsink plate of complex shape over the voltage regulator components. It transfers the heat through a heatpipe that has been slightly flattened to ensure larger contact area to a heatsink that dissipates all the heat.

Another peculiarity hides behind this heatsink. You can power the CPU using two 8-pin ATX12V power connectors!

There are six DIMM slots that can accommodate up to 24GB of DDR3 SDRAM. There are special contact sets right next to them that allow controlling the whole bunch of very important parameters such as processor, memory and chipset voltages.

Now let’s take a look at the lower part of the mainboard PCB. Just like many other previously reviewed mainboards based on Intel X58 Express, EVGA X58 SLI Classified is equipped with four PCI Express x16 graphics card slots with two top connectors always working at their full speed as PCI Express 2.0 x16 and two bottom ones sharing 16 PCI Express lanes. Moreover, the board also carries one PCI Express x1 and one regular PCI slot.

Along the lower edge of the PCB, from left to right, there are a PC Speaker that cannot be turned off, Reset, Power On and Clear CMOS buttons, several fan connectors, pin-connectors for IEEE1394 (FireWire) and four USB ports, POST indicator, color coded front panel connectors and ECP (EVGA Control Panel) connectors.

Frankly speaking, I don’t like it when you can’t turn off the integrated PC-speaker. I consider pretty loud beeping on every boot up to be more of a drawback, although certainly not a serious one. However, this time I even had some fun with it. After reflashing the BIOS with AWDFlash utility you see a blinking message that asks the user to remove the floppy and press F1 to reboot the system. This is hen PC-speaker warbled like a nightingale.