EVGA uses a modified version of the Phoenix Award BIOS on their X58 3X SLI Classified board. The menu is split into Standard CMOS, Advanced BIOS, Integrated Peripherals, Power Management PNP/PCI Configurations, PC Health, and Frequency/Voltage controls submenus. Standard CMOS has Date, Time, SATA drives, and memory detection.

Advanced BIOS Features has the HDD Boot Priority, the First Second and Third Boot Device, Boot Other Device, Boot Up Numlock status, security option and Full Screen Logo submenus. RAID or AHCI modes are set in the Integrated Peripherals submenu. Here is also where you enable or disable the JMB362 and 363 chips. Onboard devices have the LAN, the PE4 slot, the Firewire enabling and the HD Audio enabling menus.

Frequency/Voltage control is where you control the overclocking features of the motherboard. Extreme Cooling is enabled when you are using Liquid Nitrogen to cool the CPU. The memory feature menu gives you control over the various memory settings on the board. Similarly, the Voltage Control menu is where the voltage controls are changed. CPU features controls the various features of the CPU including Virtualization, number of cores, QPI Fast mode and the QPI Frequency selection. Here is also where you set the CPU Multiplier from 12x to 60x and the Base Clock frequency for the CPU.

Overclocking on this motherboard is for enthusiast users and not the faint of heart, because to get the optimum results you must use the overvoltage options. You can easily achieve a 15-20% overclock with most of the retail CPUs available from Intel at this moment, but if you want the 25-30% result, liquid or better cooling is required and time spent fine tuning the settings. We were able to overclock our test bed CPU between 15-22%, but the heat of the CPU with the voltage increases did not fare well. Overall for overclocking EVGA has a strong product, but many normal users may find themselves out of their league as this motherboard is for the hardcore overclocker who knows his shit backwards and forwards.

Bios Screenshots