EVGA X58 SLI Classified E760 reviewed

Accessories
Included with the EVGA Classified E760 are an installation CD, the user’s manual, and a visual guide i.e. quick start guide. Furthermore, you will find one 3-Way SLI with PhysX Bridge, a standard 3-Way SLI bridge, one SLI bridge, a 2-port USB and 1-port 1394 bracket, an I/O shield, one ATA-133 cable, three 2-port SATA power cables, and six ordinary SATA cables.


The motherboard comes with a decent set of and all 10 SATA ports have appropriate EVGA-branded SATA cables.

The included installation CD of course has drivers for the chipset, LAN, audio, and the extra JMicron controller. Also on the CD are NVIDIA SLI video drivers and the Intel Matrix Storage Manager. At this point in time, we would like to turn your attention to the EVGA E-Leet Tuning Utility, its new overclocking and monitoring software based off of the CPUID application, CPU-Z.

Although at first sight identical with CPU-Z, one quickly realizes that the E-Leet utility has a series of added tabs - Monitoring, Overclocking, and Voltages. The monitoring tab is divided into three functional and foreseeable sub sections; Voltages, Temperatures and Fans. Thus all readings provided in the BIOS are also available from this tab in Windows.

If E-Leet utility looks familiar, this is a combination of CPU-Z and a tweak utility... small and bloatware-free.

The overclocking tab grants you direct and on-the-fly access to sliders changing both QPI as well as PCI Express frequencies, and below is the optional adjustment of the Turbo function, which can alternatively toggle Turbo mode all together if required.

Another nifty little check box is the "Brink O/C" feature that enables the E-Leet utility to save a new validation whenever changes are made to the QPI value. Trust me; it’s very practical when closing on such high frequencies, where one more step up the base clock ladder can mean the difference between a stable and a crashed system.

The last of the new tabs, the voltage tab, allows for - as you may have guessed - real-time voltage adjustments. Please note that later versions are also fitted with a "vcore boost" ability which adds the selected and applied amount of voltage to the vcore. This appears to be a great feature, allowing a smaller incremental step, so to speak, for those that prefer to boot in, say, a daily overclock rather than crank things up via E-Leet.

Overall, we were impressed with the E-Leet software and the possibilities it encapsulates into a single application; we also think EVGA really hit the nail on the head when deciding to hook up with CPUID, rather than develop their own tools of the trade. Especially due to the fact that most enthusiasts - and to a certain extent, regular users as well - are already familiar with the CPU-Z interface.

Taking the above into consideration, real-time adjustment of QPI and BCLK frequencies still needs some thought, as going from low to high values or vice-versa can make the system crash. Seeing how great this piece of software is, we would not be surprised to see other manufacturers put a greater effort in further enhancing existing "live" overclocking tools.