EVGA's AMD motherboard features all the nice things EVGA is known for: EMI-shielded chokes, solid-state caps, overclocking BIOS... what will happen when Phenom II arrives?

That product is now in stores, retailing for around $95 under the name nForce 730a (GeForce 8200+730a, the 113-M2-E113). The board comes with custom design cooler, all passive, and features solid-state caps all around. But, you can expect real fireworks coming in time for Phenom II and Dragon platform launch. EVGA will not depart from nForce chipset world, but you can expect something spectacular, as far as overclocking is concerned. After all, EVGA didn’t poach Shamino and joined him with Vince for the sake of burning hundreds of kilos of LN2 on trade shows – expect some heavy-duty overclocking expertise on improving every enthusiast motherboard that EVGA will manufacture.
I could bet my red hair that first folk to reach 7 GHz on Phenom II platform would be either Shamino or Vince, since now they have a whole motherboard R&D team tweaking not just the BIOS, but hardware components as well – and bear in mind, that whoever has the highest clocked board that works, it will work “all peachy” in regular conditions, yet alone overclocking.
I wonder what’s brewing in EVGA’s halls… after all, nForce 8 chipsets (MCP8A series) for AMD are around the corner.

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X58 motherboard in its final production form...

Official packaging... hope there is one 8-pin power extender inside.

The motherboard, as far as several engineers is concerned, has only one design flaw: placement of 8-pin 12V rail. If your PSU comes with rigid cabling, you’ll have hellish time trying to get that cable connected to the motherboard without cutting the cabling insulation or bending the dual heat-pipe cooler for Digital PWM. On a second note, the reason for this placement is exact reason why this motherboard overclocks like there’s no tomorrow – since EVGA board supplies that whole rail into the CPU with no questions asked, the power transfer is as direct as possible.
Now, there is just one thing I am really hissy about. In product description on Tiger Direct, it states that EVGA motherboard allows customers to “Take advantage of the most significant architectural change in the x86 architecture in 13 years, the Intel Core i7.”
What kind of marketing BS is that? Core i7 is to Intel platform what Athlon 64 was to AMD’s one (even though first reviews of Bloomfield don’t show same performance jump), it is a majestic overclocking monster, but 13 years? C’mon, grow the heck up.
13 years ago, Intel introduced Pentium Pro architecture, and no, Core i7 cannot compare with the Pentium Pro (even though, there are some similarities between Pentium/Pentium Pro and Core 2/i7). In the halls of fame in IT industry, 8086, 80386, P6 (PPro), Athlon, Athlon 64 and Core 2 are the only CPUs that can be hailed as “great ones”. When Intel or AMD release a 128-bit CPU, we can talk about next “the greatest…” that came to the world of CPU architecture. Sorry.

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