EVGA is aiming its X58 Classified Core i7 motherboard at the top of the gamer/enthusiast market by including no fewer than four PCI Express 2.0 graphics slots. Unless you happen to fancy using four graphics cards to support eight displays, the ideal customer for the EVGA X58 Classified will have a yen for Tri-SLI with a fourth card for PhysX. By any standards that's an extreme amount of gaming hardware but it pretty much guarantees you can upgrade your new PC to your heart's content over the next year or two.

The colour scheme of the Classified uses the same shades of red and black that you'll find in a pack of liquorice bootlace sweets and the effect is superbly understated. We like attractive, well designed motherboards and the EVGA Classified is about as good as it gets.

You might expect that the quad graphics feature would dominate the layout of the board, but that honour actually goes to the chipset cooling system. There are three parts to the system with a large, low profile cooler on the Southbridge that is linked to an enormous passive cooler on the Northbridge with a heatpipe.

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The third passive cooler covers the power regulation hardware and, while none of that sounds out of the ordinary, the fact is that the coolers are massive. During our testing we found they did a superb job of keeping the hardware cool without any need for a noisy active fan such as you will find on the EVGA X58 SLI motherboard.

The area around the LGA1366 processor socket appears hemmed in on two sides by the enormous coolers, however there is plenty for space for a huge CPU cooler. Squeezed in behind the ports on the I/O panel there are two eight-pin power sockets to provide extra juice for extreme overclockers, always provided you have a suitable power supply.

The ports and connectors on the I/O panel deliver everything you'll need. There's one PS/2 port, eight USB ports (with four more on a bracket), one Firewire port (with a second port on another bracket), one eSATA port, dual Gigabit LAN and a full complement of audio connectors including optical and coaxial S/PDIF. You might spot a tiny red button on the I/O panel which is a hardware reset to clear the BIOS should your overclocking attempts go disastrously wrong.

On the subject of overclocking, we had no trouble raising the speed of our Core i7 965 Extreme from 3.2GHz to 3.87GHz, which is fairly good although we have seen better. You can typically expect that a high-end X58 motherboard will deliver 4GHz CPU speed so the EVGA is slightly disappointing.

Internally the list of slots and connectors is comprehensive, with six SATA ports on the Intel ICH10R Southbridge, two more SATA on a JMicron controller and another SATA port on the second JMicron chip that also controls the eSATA port, which brings the total count of SATA ports to nine.

The graphics slots supply 32 lanes of PCI Express 2.0 that are divided 16+16 with dual graphics cards or 8+8+8+8 if you go the whole hog and install quad cards. Installing three dual-slot Nvidia graphics cards in Tri-SLI is a matter of simplicity, although the single PCI slot will be obscured. Adding a fourth graphics card for PhysX is a different matter, as the card will cover the Power and Reset micro buttons along with the Clear CMOS button, two out of four chassis fan plugs and the header for the second Firewire port.

You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs so perhaps you're prepared to suffer that inconvenience, but we came across another, more fundamental issue. During our testing we found that the combination of a Core i7 processor and two or three high-end graphics cards is such a potent combination that the addition of a fourth card for PhysX makes no noticeable difference to gaming performance.

There's no doubt in our mind that the Classified is a fine Core i7 X58 motherboard. The build quality and list of features are exemplary but we feel that the fourth graphics slot is unnecessary. This means that you are effectively paying a huge premium for the superb passive cooling system on the chipset, which makes it an expensive luxury.