Layout

The EVGA X79 Dark comes with a non ATX format. The board is a tiny big larger than the ATX format or in other words 2.3 cm. Regarding the form factor the X79 Dark is compliant with the E-ATX standard. If you want it or not, the design of EVGA's X79 Dark reminds of ASUS' ROG series motherboard, with the apparent difference that there is huge EVGA logo on the southbridge cooler. Combined it makes the design rather unique and good looking. Furthermore the southbridge cooler as well as the power design coolers have been shaped with a lot of attention to detail. The layout itself has been well thought and there are plenty of cool features - five PCIe 16x slots, ten SATA connectors, four USB 3.0 on the back, a Realtek ALC898 and more ...

EVGA equipped the X79 Dark with a 12+4 phase digital power design with an IR3550M Chip from International Rectifier is taking care of the CPU VRM. Furthermore you will find 100 % Japan made high quality capacitors so that's a pretty strong power design.
The memory gets two digital phases per bank (4 DIMMs), which are also driven by chips from International Rectifier. In this case there are IR3553M chips. This gives you 4 phases in total for the memory.

Totally you'll find eight DIMM-slots on the EVGA X79 Dark. Officially supported are the following clock speeds: DDR3 2400+ MHz. If all the slots are equipped with 8 Gigabyte modules, you can have a maximum of 64 Gigabyte memory on this motherboard. There is also enough space around the CPU socket, to install large CPU coolers.

Southbridge as well as current converters are being held at adequate temperatures via two passive cooling blocks. Booth blocks are massive and they can therefore cope witch quite a decent amount of heat. Apart from that the cooling blocks have been very well manufactured and also very well attached to the board to provide enough pressure on the components they have to cool down. The PCH cooler received a large EVGA logo in red, which looks rather nice and unique.

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 9 - SiSoft Sandra 1
Page 2 - Specs and Delivery	Page 10 - SiSoft Sandra 2
Page 3 - Layout	Page 11 - Super Pi 1M / 32M / wPrime
Page 4 - Connectors and I/O	Page 12 - Games
Page 5 - BIOS	Page 13 - Power Consumption
Page 6 - Test setup	Page 14 - Performance Rating
Page 7 - 3D Mark 11	Page 15 - Conclusion
Page 8 - PC Mark 7

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