EVGA P55 Classified 200 LGA1156 Motherboard Review

Hardware Installation

With a new socket, one would expect that hardware installation will require a new CPU cooler or at least a new mount from our standard Thermalright Ultra-120 eXtreme (TRUE) model. That is not going to be the case for us today as we have already seen that the EVGA P55 Classified 200 comes with both LGA 1156 and LGA 775 mounting holes. Naturally we want to see how well the TRUE fits with the 775 mounting hardware.

The good news is that the TRUE fits with the LGA 775 mounting hardware. The center of the TRUE's base does need to sit a little high up on the CPU, but it shouldn't affect performance at all. It is the proximity to the NF200 heat sink causing the heat sink to sit slightly towards the top of the board; but the TRUE definitely will work on this motherboard without having to buy LGA 1156 mounting hardware. The best part is that both heat sinks around the CPU socket are low enough to provide plenty of space for the TRUE's outstretched wingspan. Let's see what happens with some fans and memory modules installed.

We continue the fashion show by stuffing the DIMM slots with four sticks of OCZ Blade memory and slapping a 38mm wide fan above the modules. The fan does sit a bit high but as far as we are concerned, it is a perfect match. Towards the rear I/O panel, we mount another 38mm wide fan above the PWM heat sink. As we can see in the second photo above, this push/pull setup looks perfect, even with four memory modules mounted and dual 38mm thick fans.

In the first photo above we have replaced the four OCZ Blade modules and mounted a pair of Mushkin Redline Ascent modules in the primary red slots. This configuration lets us sit the push fan marginally lower offering a bit more air to move through the PWM heat sink on the other side. We don't show it above but memory such as Corsair Dominator memory will force the fan to sit slightly higher up with some heat sinks.

With the height of the heat sinks surrounding the socket, we didn't even bother twisting the TRUE as it will clearly fit with no issues. So we have moved on to mounting GPU's to look for any issues. Above we start with a single GTX 295. As expected, there doesn't appear to be any problems. With the card in the top PCI-E 16X slot there is plenty of clearance to the DIMM slots and the CPU heat sink, even as twisted as the TRUE sits using the LGA 775 holes. With a lack of any PCI slots, the single GTX 295 - as with all dual slot cards - doesn't really affect much else. There are still four PCI-E 16X slots available and with the 90 degree angled SATA ports, access to all available ports is accomplished.

The next task was to see how many MSI HD4890 Cyclone's we could fit in the P55 Classified 200. Two and three card setups install no problem. The spacing for a dual card setup in two 16X slots is perfect, giving plenty of room for air to get in-between the cards. The three card setup above also works very nicely on this motherboard. The simple fact that we can mount and run three video cards with the P55 Classified 200 makes it in a class of its own for P55 motherboards. Well, almost, the only other board capable of three way SLI or CF is the EVGA FTW 200, which happens to be very similar to this Classified.

The fun really begins when we add a fourth card to the mix. Obviously this setup isn't for the faint of heart as it requires an aftermarket heat sink and fan on one card and a bit of maneuvering in order to get the cards spaced for operation. Regardless of how odd it looks with the bottom two cards at the angle they are, the setup just looks lethal. We'll be exploring the scaling of 4x4890's in this setup a little later on. As we can see though, there really are endless options for setups with this motherboard. Most people aren't going to be running four or even three video cards but the option is there for ATI or NVIDIA based cards.