During the course
of our venture at CES 2010, we had an incredible opportunity to stop by the
EVGA suite at the Wynn Resort in Las Vegas for two hours of talk-time with
Product Manager Jacob Freeman and living overclocking legend Peter Tan “Shamino”
regarding some upcoming products in the company’s queue.
Last March, the company released a product lineup that drove
us enthusiasts to spend our time e-camping on its product page for weeks in
advance, pledged us to skip precious hours of sleep and encouraged us to converse
with hundreds of fellow EVGA forum dwellers into the wee hours of the night. The
company dubbed these products “the ULTIMATE in X58 motherboards,” a revolution
in modern PC overclocking freedom and potential which became known as the EVGA
X58 SLI Classified series. Since that time, there have been unprecedented
advances in performance trends across the HWBot as enthusiasts seek to murder
the 3DMark world record stats pages and motivate the cycle of hardware
innovation for generations to come.
EVGA’s flagship X58
4-way SLI compared with the EVGA 270-GT-W555
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for a larger image
EVGA’s latest and greatest creation comes in the form of a
dual-socket LGA 1366 enormous giant codenamed 270-GT-W555. Right off the top,
it is clearly evident that this is perhaps the largest PC gaming and
enthusiast-oriented motherboard to have ever been considered for release in the
public consumer market. It not only features dual LGA 1366 sockets for Intel 45nm
Xeon 5500-series processors and upcoming 32nm Westmere-based variants, but it also
supports up to 48GB of DDR3 1600MHz+ working in triple-channel mode across all
twelve slots. The board utilizes a single Intel 5520 server chipset and is intended to support dual-QPI processors. However, EVGA tells us that the board can run single processors for those still managing to find the cash for two. However, we aren't sure if that means both Core i7 and Xeon CPUs or just the latter.
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for a larger image
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for a larger image
Many have been asking about the form-factor type of the
270-GT-W555 for the past few days since its official debut at CES. We tried
getting answers out of Jacob and Peter, but they told us that there is
currently no official ATX standard for this size board. We searched through
Wikipedia and stumbled upon a form factor known as Super WTX, but not much is known
about it and Intel appears to have discontinued the WTX
standard almost ten years ago. What we do know is that the EVGA board will
fit in a Pizza Hut extra-large pizza box – not quite a Domino’s box – and that
it only fits in two computer case lineups ever manufactured in the world. One series
is from Lian-Li, and the other series is from SuperMicro.
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for a larger image
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for a larger image
The board also features eight USB 2.0 ports, two of which
conveniently double as eSATA ports, as well as two SuperSpeed USB 3.0 ports
powered by an NEC
µPD720200 controller chip. During our time on the show floor at CES, we
spoke with product managers from ASUS, MSI and even NEC, who all stated that
even the high-end market sector is not showing enough demand for manufacturers
to integrate complete sets of USB 3.0 ports into their latest boards. Sure, it’s
possible to integrate more controllers, but even EVGA’s monstrous creation does
not need them at this point in time.
The 270-GT-W555 also features a total of eight SATA ports,
six of which are black-colored and run at 3Gbps. The other two are red-colored
and run at 6Gbps. Thankfully, there are no JMicron controllers present on this
board, and we are glad to report that all of these ports run off the Intel
ICH10R southbridge.
We noticed that a few fellows on the XtremeSystems 270-GT-W555
discussion thread were complaining about the board not having 90-degree
SATA ports. Rest assured, we can guarantee that every graphics card to date is
able to fit on this board. We even brought some Radeon HD 5970s to EVGA’s suite
in an attempt to test them for size and we can confirm that the 12.2-inch cards
left plenty of room to spare for all of the SATA ports and even the BIOS
selection switch. Out of respect, however, we didn’t take any pictures of the
Radeon cards on the board due to the fact that EVGA is an Nvidia partner and a
great one at that.
The only issue we noticed on the board was the one that
Peter pointed out to us. When the northbridge heatsink is in place and the top
PCI-E slot is occupied, it becomes difficult to hold the slot latch in order to
remove the GPU because there is simply not enough room for fingers to get
between the heatsink and the latch. The EVGA team asked us whether we would
prefer to keep the slot-latch design or whether some other type of mechanism
should be implemented instead. Before the final production model enters
production, it would be a good idea for some of you guys to recommend Peter alternative
solutions to the problem in the XtremeSystems forum thread above.
One of the more convenient aspects of the 270-GT-W555 in
terms of overclocking is the fact that it features triple BIOS support, allowing
overclockers to boot from three separately available startup configurations.
This feature was first introduced with the P55 FTW and will continue to be
standard on the company’s upcoming high-end and enthusiast product offerings.
At this point, many of you are probably wondering how the
seven PCI-Express slot layout works and how many lanes each of them supports in
different respective SLI and CrossFire modes. In perspective, the 270-GT-W555
features two Nvidia Nforce 200 chips that enable for full PCI-Express 2.0 x16
bandwidth across Slot 1, Slot 3, Slot 5 and Slot 7 simultaneously. If all seven
slots are populated by single-slot cards at the same time, then they will all
run in x8 mode except for the very bottom slot which will run in x16 mode.
Peter made note that Slot 7 will always run in x16 mode while the other six will
vary in bandwidth depending on the number of GPUs installed. This could prove
to be very useful for Tri-SLI + PhysX, in which all four cards would be able to
run in x16 mode, an impressive feat only capable on this board.
Peter has also included dual 8-phase Digital PWM layouts,
one for each processor socket. Each of them supports frequencies of up to
1333KHz which can be managed in the BIOS. Of course, the CPU sockets themselves
are infused with three times the normal amount of gold content of a standard CPU
socket and feature Super-low ESR and ESL Film Capacitors right behind the
sockets, also known as “LICC Capacitors”
(Low Inductance Chip Capacitors) – but most enthusiasts already know these
features come standard with EVGA Classified Series motherboards.
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for a larger image
Most of us know that when Peter designs and engineers a new
motherboard for EVGA, it comes feature-packed with a very purist approach to ensuring
the cleanest electric currents and voltages travel to discreet sections of the
board with incredible precision. On the 270-GT-W555, each CPU socket is
equipped with a 6-pin PCI-Express and an 8-pin EPS12V connector, each capable
of supplying its own +12V to the processors current under heavy overclocking scenarios
where power strain is an issue. In addition, there is a 6-pin PCI-Express
connector near Slot 1 on the PCI-Express layout, which is capable of delivering
additional power to all seven PCI-Express slots if needed.
Last but not least, it might be important to mention that
the board does include an IDE connector, but not a floppy connector. Some of us
still reluctantly sport IDE drives in our cases – you know who you are – but in
2010, there is absolutely no reason for anyone to be using a floppy drive
anymore. Windows XP RAID drivers can always be slipstreamed if that’s the main
concern, and it usually is. At the same time, the board supports EVGA’s new
EVBot for adjusting CPU voltages on the fly, and we are definitely convinced by
its novelty use after Peter used it to break a Core i3 world record under
liquid nitrogen during the XtremeSystems Party at CES.
All in all, the EVGA 270-GT-W555 is perhaps the most powerful
piece of consumer-end computing hardware we’ve seen in the past few years. While
this EVGA Classified Series board doesn’t have a name yet, we really hope it
will be something along the lines of “FTMFW Edition” because honestly, nothing
less would do it justice. EVGA expects it to go on sale sometime between late
March and end the end of April, but pricing is currently unknown at this point.
The company did say that it would be priced according to the extensive hardware
it packs, and we are truly expecting something in the $700 range, but this is
only a rough estimate as the company’s officials haven’t yet agreed on a price
point. We look forward with great anticipation to seeing Peter’s latest and
greatest creation hit the retail channel in just a couple short months from
now.
EVGA 270-GT-W555
testing in the lab
