Every few years Intel launches a new CPU interface with one or more motherboard chipsets to support the new interface and various motherboard manufacturers follow suit basing their motherboards either upon Intel’s reference design or designing their own motherboards to compete with Intel’s best. Late last year Intel announced the Nehalem CPU architecture with the X58 motherboard chipset and Socket-1366 CPUs dubbed Core i7 hitting the market. Performance has been redefined from the previous champion, the QX9770 with the Core i7 965 CPU being faster than everything on the market.

EVGA has long been known as a provider of NVIDIA based video cards and motherboards with some dalliance into other product lines. They entered the motherboard market with the launch of the nForce 590 SLI chipset with some success. They have released motherboards based upon every NVIDIA chipset since and recently have released Intel X58 chipsets as NVIDIA does not have a license to use Quick Path Interconnect which is required to use these CPUs. They have released several X58 motherboards and today I’m reviewing the EVGA X58 3X SLI Classified motherboard.