EVGA P55 Classified 200 LGA1156 Motherboard Review

Extreme Overclocking & Benchmarking

Consider this recess in an otherwise long and uneventful school day. Well, for us it is because the Extreme Overclocking & Benchmarking section is where all the fun happens. We won't be taken an exhaustive look at the P55 Classified 200 under sub-zero conditions because we don't really have a good assortment of GPU's on hand to produce any exciting 3D results. In fact, the GTX 200 that was used for one of the benches in this section actually had an unexpected death after a little stupidity on our part. So consider this a warm-up in what is sure to be plenty of sub-zero results you will see from this motherboard.

This first step in any sub-zero benching is appropriate insulation and for that we turn to kneaded rubber eraser. This appears to be the method of choice for many benchers these days. Some old skool overclockers seem to think they are too cool for rubber eraser but it is just because they are old and can't be bothered to learn how to change their ways...you know who you are. The photos above show a quick look at the process of insulating in and around the CPU socket with eraser. The goal is simply to prevent air from contacting portions of the motherboard that will become cold through transfer from the CPU being cooled. Once complete - as shown in the second photo above - we are now ready for our top layer of insulation and mounting of the cooling.

After the kneaded eraser and a single layer of shop towel gets laid down, we then use a couple layers of armacell with a hole cut out for our evaporator. This is where our first little snag came when we tried to mount the evap of the single stage phase change unit. In the second photo above in the top half you can see the hold down coming into contact with the NF200 heat sink. The good news is that it was just the plastic cover and glowing E. That piece is just glued on so we popped it off and were able to get a great mount with the evap using the LGA775 holes.

With EVGA adding those LGA775 mounting holes it really saved us some hassle by not having to refab new hold downs for the CPU pot and phase change evap. Well, we will eventually have to get new hold downs, it just let us continue to be lazy. Here is a list of hardware used in this section, it is pretty much the same lineup as used in the rest of the review as we didn't really get crazy here.

Below are a pair of photos of our setup with each cooling solution while the system was running. Our single stage phase change unit was mounted on this setup for a lot of testing and prep for sub-zero. That is the normal progression, get everything setup and tested on the phase just to see how the system will react sub-zero, then simply dial in CPU clocks with LN2.

As you can see we run around -25C for evap temp with the phase change unit and this CPU allowed us to run almost at -100C under LN2. Under both conditions, the board behaves very well but cold boot bug is a bit of an issue simply due to the fact that the board powers down so many times during changes and freezes. We learned from Peter that EVBot will be a big assistance when benching with LN2 because if the system freezes, the clock generator stays at whatever BCLK was set. Normally this means it is too high to boot so if you hit reset right away, the system will try to boot at the clocks you were just running and end up having to shut down because the PCH receives no signal from the CPU. With EVBot, you can lower the BCLK before hitting the reset button after a freeze and many times the system will reboot without a power down...thus avoiding cold boot bug issues.

I think we have had enough photos and discussion, so let's take a look at a couple results from the time we spent with the EVGA P55 Classified 200 running at sub-zero temperatures. We start with some memory testing in Super Pi with our Single Stage Phase Cooling

SPi 1M @ 5025MHz :: 2x2GB click for full size...

SPi 32M @ 4356MHz :: 4x2GB click for full size...

SPi 32M @ 4618MHz :: 2x2GB click for full size...

And finally just a few results from running under LN2.

SPi 1M @ 241x9 :: 5299MHz click for full size...	SPi 32M @ 238x22 :: 5233MHz click for full size...
wPrime @ 231x22 :: 5080MHz click for full size...	3DMark 05 @ 232x22 :: 5100MHz click for full size...

Probably the most impressive of all of these overclocks is the wPrime results because this is clearly where the motherboard is playing a big role in the numbers. On HWBot, this CPU isn't nearly the highest clocking i7 860 for single core benchmarks like 1M, 32M, or CPU-Z validation. But with this motherboard, we easily took second place in the wPrime 1024M benchmark. The power of the Classified digital PWM and enhancements to the CPU socket once again prove valuable, like the X58 Classified known for overclocking i7 CPU's much better under extreme conditions. We close this cold section with an appropriate photo, what it means to be an overclocker in Canada...even a small snow storm doesn't keep this dewar from being filled.