The red Power On button is highlighted with a red LED when on. And the black Reset button has a built-in yellow LED that lights up when the HDDs are active. When the board is installed into an open testbed it is very convenient to have the storage devices status indicator in front of you. Unfortunately, there are very few mainboards, besides EVGA X58 SLI Classified, that offer the same convenient feature.

There are six Serial ATA ports (black color) along the right side of the mainboard. They allow building RAID arrays, as the ICH10R South Bridge provides the corresponding RAID support. Another two SATA connectors (red color) and one PATA connector are implemented via an additional JMicron JMB363 controller.

As you can see, the heatsink over the chipset South Bridge is very large:

It is connected with the heatsink over the chipset North Bridge with a heatpipe:

The heatsink over the chipset North Bridge is simply gigantic. Three heatpipes transfer the heat from the chip to the heatsink. And a large “E” designed as the first letter of the EVGA logo is highlighted with twinkling and therefore not annoying red light.

All heatsinks are attached using secure screw-on retention; there are no plastic push-pins or clips of any kind. You can clearly see it, if you turn the board over and look at the bottom side of it:

We could once again joke about the inertia that drives the developers or the intentions behind the marketing approach to placing humongous heatsinks over the core logic chips on Intel X58 Express based mainboards. We could also smile about those trusting users who happily purchase mainboards with these “enhanced” chipset cooling systems. As we all know, Intel X58 Express based mainboards do not require increasing the North Bridge voltage even during overclocking that is why even a small heatsink would be enough for proper North Bridge cooling. However, we are not going to be sarcastic this time, because looks like these large heatsinks are not for decoration: EVGA X58 SLI Classified really does need them. The thing is that the heatsink over the chipset South Bridge covers not only the ICH10R chip, but also additional storage controllers as well as Nvidia NF200 chip. Just like all PCI Express bus controllers we have discussed before, NF200 chip eats up a lot of energy and runs very hot. Therefore, the heatpipe between the heatsinks over the North and the South Bridge chips runs right above it and that is why the large size of the chipset heatsinks is absolutely justified.