Your Guide to Noob-dom

Paired with the day’s launch of the GeForce GTX 285 Classified, EVGA rolled out its newest motherboard monstrosity, the EVGA X58 Classified 4-Way SLI (170-BL-E762-A1). This is one of the first motherboards based on the XL-ATX form-factor, with the board measuring 13.58 x 10.375 inches (L x W), which makes it as wide as an E-ATX motherboard, only longer. For use inside a chassis, the company recommends one with at least 10 expansion slots. It is based on the Intel X58 + ICH10R chipset supporting socket LGA-1366 processors, and might be making use of NVIDIA nForce 200 bridge chips to support its seven PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slots, with adequate spacing to support four of its newest GTX 285 Classified graphics cards

It has every feature its predecessor the X58 Classified 3-way SLI does, including a 10-phase digital PWM power design for the CPU that can provide up to 600W of power to the CPU for extreme overclocking. The pins in the LGA-1366 socket have 300% more elemental gold for better conductivity. The power is further conditioned by low-ESR film capacitors. A much larger monolithic heatsink cools the chipset. The portion over the northbridge features a fan for active cooling. Other features include support for up to 24 GB of triple-channel DDR3 memory, 9 SATA 3 Gb/s connectors, 8 channel audio, dual gigabit Ethernet, and Firewire. The X58 Classified 4-Way SLI has been listed on the company store, placed on pre-order for US $449.99.

source:tpu

ASUS stirred up the enthusiast community recently with its dual-GeForce GTX 285 accelerator that for the first time, lets four fully-loaded G200b GPUs function in quad-SLI. Perhaps responding to it, EVGA rolled out the EVGA GeForce GTX 285 Classified (01G-P3-1190-AR), the first single-GPU GeForce accelerator to support 4-way SLI (or Quad-SLI). With a small but significant number of SLI-compatible motherboards with four PCI-Express x16 slots already out there, EVGA hopes to cash in with its newest product.

The GeForce GTX 285 Classified sticks to reference NVIDIA clock speeds of 648/1242 MHz (core/memory), while leaving it to the user to overclock it, by providing a number of design enhancements. It also sticks to having 1 GB of memory. To begin with, this card features a full 8-phase digital-PWM power design, and makes use of high-grade components such as film capacitors. It draws power from three 6-pin PCI-E power connectors. Voltage measure points for VPLL, DRAM VDDQ, DRAM VDD, and VGPU are nucleated in a convenient location for easy measurements. The card supports EVGA’s EVbot device that provides control over the card’s parameters in the hands of the user. The EVbot can be directly plugged in to the card. Finally, the card supports 4-way SLI. At this point what its SLI bridge looks like is not known, but hopefully it’s provided with the card or the EVGA’s newest motherboard. It has been listed on the company store for US $379.99, currently on pre-order.

source:tpu