14 DAY TRIAL // EVGA was revealed to have been working on a dual-socked motherboard at the start of January, but, other than a few pictures and what could be deduced from them, the company didn't exactly shower the media with details on the board. More recently, however, it seems that the folks over at Bit-tech.net have been getting steady information on the product and the actual capabilities of the mainboard seem ready to make it “one of this year's most interesting products.”
The ones responsible for the creation of the EVGA W555 were a design team led by Peter 'Shamino' Tan. While the beast was already known to possess monstrous memory, processing and expansion capabilities, the main element that had not yet been revealed was that it was actually targeting overclockers. The board is meant to work in conjunction with two Xeon W5000-series central processing units, though 'central' won't exactly be a fitting word when there are two of them on the same board.
The EVGA W555 depends on these processors' respective pairs of QPI links. One link will communicate with the chipset, while the other will enable the communication between the two processors. Unfortunately, while this means that new performance heights will become accessible, it also means that just as powerful Core i7 chips will be unusable, as they each have a single QPI link.
The only drawback to the incompatibility with Core i7 chips is the fact that the Xeon CPUs are quite a bit more expensive than them, although this will likely be a minor issue for professional overclockers. Most likely, the possibility to overclock a couple of 8-thread processors (four physical and four logical cores) will outweigh any reservation that may arise concerning costs.
Naturally, for enthusiast overclocking, the board has a considerable supply of memory modules, six to be exact, for a maximum of two sets of three DDR3 modules in triple-channel configurations. In addition, nearly half of the surface of the EVGA W555 is taken up by the seven PCI Express x16 slots, which are managed through the combined effort of the Intel 5520 chipset and two nForce 200 controllers. The nForce 200 controllers also make the board CrossFire- and SLI-certified.
Finally, what may seem rather awkward to regular consumers but perhaps convenient to overclockers is the existence of an IDE connector. While rather outdated, overclockers sometimes prefer IDE drives over SATA because most benchmarks are not affected by drive speed and SATA controllers are generally more sensitive to big overclocks.
The exact dimensions of the board have not been disclosed but Bit-tech.net mentions that, according to EVGA, it is predictably larger than both E-ATX and SSI standards.