The sleek, black X99 Classified is the second most expensive board on test , but It has plenty of features. The top-right corner has power and reset buttons, a clear-CMOS button, a triple-BIOS switcher and a two-character POST display.
The EVGA is also the only board in the Labs to provide two 8-pin CPU power connectors – comparably, the Asus Rampage V Extreme only has single 8-pin and 4-pin plugs. The EVGA is also one of only two boards on test to include two M.2 connectors, and the PCI-E slots make full use of Haswell-E’s potential 40 PCI-E lanes. This board can run two 16x PCI-E slots at their full speed, or four slots at 8x – enough power for all but the greediest of graphics configurations.
All these features mean the board is cramped, especially the area around the motherboard socket, but EVGA has worked to improve cable tidying by installing most of the edge connectors at right angles, from the SATA ports to the ATX socket. There are ten SATA 6Gbps ports too, but other boards are more versatile in this respect. The Asus Rampage V Extreme, for example, has eight SATA 6Gbps ports and two SATA Express connectors – the latter connection is entirely absent from the EVGA. The rear I/O panel didn’t blow us away either, as USB 2 ports outnumber USB 3 ports by six to four.
Sadly, while the EVGA is expensive and feature-packed, but it didn’t live up to its price in our benchmarks. It came fourth out of the five boards in every single application benchmark – that’s including our own tests as well as Cinebench – and, when running at stock speeds, it could only manage fourth place in the Shogun gaming test. The speed differences are all minor, however.
We encountered several issues during our time with the X99 Classified though. When running with an i7-5960X, the board wouldn’t allow the CPU to drop into its low-power state, which explains why the board’s idle power consumption of 99W was the highest on test by 32W. The board wouldn’t let the CPU use Turbo boost properly either – it was only able to hit 3.3GHz (rather than 3.5GHz) with all eight cores active, which we confirmed with CPU-Z. According to EVGA, this is normal operation, but it’s this behaviour that hampered the EVGA’s benchmark performance at stock speeds.
We couldn’t force the CPU to run at 3.5GHz in the EFI either, but we could lock the chip to higher speeds, so overclocking won’t be affected by that unusual issue. Overclocking revealed issues of its own though. We ran the 5960X at a stable 4.2GHz with a 1.225V vcore, which was the lowest on test, but there’s no
sign of a variable TJ Max on this board (this sets the allowed thermal limit of the CPU, and it’s variable on other boards) – it’s locked to 89°C using a Core i7-5960X. That top figure will probably limit serious tweakers.
When overclocked to 4.2GHz, the EVGA improved though: it led the way in three of the four application benchmark tests, took the silver medal in Cinebench and gained ground in Shogun. Power consumption improved too – when overclocked and running at load, no board was more frugal.
EVGA’s board is rammed with features, but it offers little that can’t be found on other boards, with the MSI X99S Gaming 7 also including M.2 connectors, on-board buttons and POST displays while costing much less. The EVGA also misses some of the features, such as Wi-Fi, SATA Express and a bevy of USB 3 ports, that are included on the high-end Asus. Combine the high price with the inconsistent performance and strange frequency issues, and it becomes hard to recommend this board. If you’re still interested, we’d wait until BIOS updates have ironed out the early issues – and the price may have dropped by then too. MIKE JENNINGS
VERDICT
A high price, but one that sadly isn’t matched by this board’s performance or features.
SPECIFICATIONS
Chipset Intel X99
CPU socket Intel LGA2011-v3
Memory support 8 slots: max 128GB DDR4 (up to 3,000MHz overclocked)
Expansion slots Five 16x PCI-E 3, one 4x PCI-E 3
Sound Creative 8-channel
Networking 2 x Intel Gigabit LAN
Overclocking Base clock 80–250MHz, CPU multiplier 12-80x; max voltages, CPU 2V, RAM 2V
Ports 10 x SATA 6Gbps (X99), 2 x M.2, 4 x USB 3, 6 x USB 2, 2 x LAN, 3 x audio out, line-in, mic, 1 x optical S/PDIF
Dimensions (mm) 305 x 264