Evga X58 Sli Le Motherboard

Alright so we're looking at the EVGA X58 SLI but this is the LE version so you'll notice that right off the bat it is all black, which is kind of cool. Now the whole point of this motherboard is to give you the ability to run X58 and a Core i7 CPU but not spend that much money. And this thing is actually cheaper than the regular X58 SLI board from EVGA and the reason that that is is because they got rid of some stuff which we'll talk about in just a second. But they give you all the good stuff, you're still getting the X58 northbridge, you're getting the ICH10R southbridge chipset which is an incredible, incredible southbridge chipset for your hard drives. Four PCI Express x16 slots, which is quite impressive as you can tell. There are just four of them on the board. It means you can run triple three-way SLI with a dedicated PhysX processor which is quite, quite incredible now. The differences that you kind of do lose though is that there's now only 12, there's still 12 USB ports in total, but basically what's happening is that the USB ports moved from the back panel and being readily useable, to going onto headers over here in the front. So the headers are going to provide more of your USBs now. A lot of them moved from being inside, or on the back panel to being on the headers. Another thing that happened is you lost a single, one of your 10/100/1000 ethernet ports. You had dual Gigabit LAN before, now you have single Gigabit LAN which is still pretty good. Most people do not need the dual Gigabit. It doesn't really help you that much, sometimes it helps you a little bit with when you have teaming technology, helps smooth out some VoIP stuff or your online gaming, but for the majority of users you're not going to notice the difference and if you're just transferring stuff over your network, you're never ever going to notice the difference. Now let's talk about what this does have, lots of lots of great features. Now first of all you will notice that the CPU coolers on here are all completely separated. They do not have any pipes linking to them and they're also completely passively cooled, so you do want to have a case that has some pretty good cooling inside of it and a lot of airflow to keep all of these cool because they will get hot. But, what's also very good about them is they're very easy to remove. You want to take these out and you actually want to replace them with water cooling or bigger full ones, you can do that and since you're saving money on the board to begin with, you have that option, you have that ability. It's all going to be there. Let's talk a little bit about overclocking because this board has all the good stuff. Beyond being able to run the triple SLI to make it a great gaming machine, if you're into benchmarks, you're trying to run Vantage or O6, you have a lot of ability to overclock on this board as far as the processor goes. Now if you look over here, you've got about six phases of power on the CPU, and it's a digital. It's a hybrid PWM, so it's half digital, half analog. It's got six phases for the CPU, it's also got two phases for the northbridge and there's an additional two phases for the memory which is over here. Now as far as memory goes, this is triple channel DDR3 memory, up to 1600 megahertz native. It will overclock to way above that. I've gotten my Corsair Dominator GT on here to over 2100 megahertz which is really, really, really fast. It also, just so you know, if you want to put triple channel memory here and you're only going to run one channel, you want to make sure you use the grey slots. The grey slots are the ones that are going to take your first set, and then if you're going to run 12 gigs you can run the black ones and if you're going to run 24 gigs this does support the 4 gigabyte DIMMs. So moving on over here to the front, you will notice that we have 2, 4, 6 SATA ports in total. Those are going to support RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 5 and JBOD on top of that in case you want to use that. You also have on the board you will notice, one of my favorite things, I love this board because it got rid of one of the dumbest things I have ever seen on modern motherboards. It got rid of the IDE and the floppy. Yes, thank God. After all this time, I've been waiting to see a board that just didn't have it and this is the first one. Absolutely incredible, there is no IDE on here as you can see, there's no headers, there's no floppy, there's just SATA which is all you need now. Besides that everything else is here though. So we got PS2 over here, we have 2 USB 2.0 ports. We have a clear CMOS button. We have the S/PDIF in both the analog which is the coaxial and the digital which is the optical S/PDIF. We've got two USB 2.0 ports right here, another two right there, and then the final two right there. Again your 10/100/1000 ethernet, which is now reduced from two down to one, but is not really that big of a deal and your very very nice 7.1 channel audio with a very good chipset controlling it. Another really cool overclocking feature is that you actually have contact points to measure voltages for all your different voltages, whether it be your Vcore, your DIMM memories, your termination voltages, your CPU PLL, all that stuff you can actually check individually with a multimeter so that you actually have an accurate voltage versus usually the ones that in the software are not very accurate. Here you get an exact idea of what's going on. So a lot of really really great features on here. You also have a very nice overclocking BIOS made by Phoenix. I don't know if you can see the chip right there. It's a PhoenixBIOS, works very very well. Other overclocking features include power and reset buttons down here as well as a clear CMOS, so if you're running this thing on a bench you're going to have the ability to turn it on and off right here. You don't have to worry about actually, you know, plugging in your front panel connectors which is kind of annoying. Also right above the real front panel connectors over here, you're going to notice you do have an LCD poster. That LCD poster is going to tell you post codes if you have errors and it's going to double as a temperature gauge for your CPU. Once you go through the post process it will automatically just switch over and then from there it will just give you pretty much the memory, I mean the temperature of the CPU, sorry. So overall great, great, great board. We're actually, I'm going to show you, actually I'm going to throw some video cards on here and throw some power supplies on here and show you what this little, very affordable yet very, very nice and high-end X58 board can do so stick around and we'll be right back. Alright so here's what we're going to do. I set up a nice little system here, EVGA X58 SLI LE, and I threw this Noctua cooler on it, triple SLI with a 9800GT for PhysX and of course our GT memory, a bunch of hard drives to test the ability for the ICH10R southbridge chipset. And what we're going to do here is throw some overclocking on it to show you how far it will actually go. Now here's what we're going to do. Right now you're going to see, here's my screen display and you are looking at the E-LEET tuning utility that comes with the motherboard and I'm going to go ahead and hit alt-1, I'm going to apply the overclocking to the graphics card. They're pretty overclocked. The CPU is going to be a 4 gigahertz and we're going to run it prime 95 just to show you that this board, although it has like a really affordable price and it kind of seems to be like it might be a little bit lower than the X58 SLI board, it actually will do a very solid 4 gigahertz overclock as you can see the temperatures are really really nice with that Noctua cooler. And even when you load it up with Firmark and you have everything cranked up, it's going to produce nice overclocking results. If you want to get your hands on the EVGA X58 SLI LE motherboard, type in E145-2059 into the search engine of any of these major websites. For ComputerTV, I'm Albert. ...from the regular one. We're going to look at the back panel because most of it is on the back panel. You're going to see up in here we have. -Did you get that? Change the battery? -Yeah I got that.