We already showed you what EVGA 680i black pearl board looks like. you can read more here. Our board is one of the first samples of this EVGA water cooled motherboard and we spent some quality time with the setup. The first impressions are impressive as we managed to break the 1300 MHz score with the memory. To be more precise we managed to run the memory at 1320 MHz but it was not stable at all times. The motherboard has four water blocks in total and it is meant for single slot cards only. EVGA prefers that whoever buys this board uses their water cooled card as the dual slot air cooled card simply won't fit inside. 

 

 

EVGA uses high quality Innovatek water blocks and this is an ideal setup for a quiet but overclocked PC. The company water cools the Northbridge, Southbridge chips and the CPU, and the Mosfets.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is the final setup with a Quad core QX6700 at 3575MHz and FBS at 1300 MHz. everything was water cooled as you can see, apart from the graphics card. We used EVGA's 8600 GTS card simply because it is one of the few single slot cards. 

 

Now you can even buy Flexx 9600 but we didn't get our hands on it. We tested the good old 9200 and we scored some great results. You do need to use 2.5V for this memory, but the warranty supports even such a high voltage. This is probably the best you can do as far as memory goes. 

 

 

 

Everest	Memory Read	Memory Write	Memory copy	Memory Latency
OCZ 9200 Flex 5-5-5-18 1150MHz	7965 MB/s	5236 MB/s	5811 MB/s	55.8 ns
OCZ 9200 Flex 5-5-5-18 1300MHz	8738 MB/s	5927 MB/s	6470 MB/s	48.7 ns

We tested Everest at 1300 MHz 5-5-5-18 and you can clearly see that you get much better scores at this speed. This is the first time we managed to score 1300 MHz and get any test stable. It is even stable at 1300 MHz with SuperPi. 

 

Our setup included CPU QX6700 ( at 3575MHz w. FSB at 1300 MHz), OCZ Flex 9200 (at 1300 MHz) EVGA 8600GTS and even at this high overclocking the board worked at a modest 48 Celsius and the Quad core Intel worked at 59 Celsius, while the cores were running at 70 Celsius.  

 

 

 

This was not enough for us and we tried to push it even more. We managed to work in Windows, but SuperPi was not stable at 660 or 1320 MHz which is the absolute record for us.  

Here is the happy family picture. the only problem with this board is its cost. It will include Innovatek's water cooling but in total it will cost a hefty €500. This is the best overclocking board for us but it does cost some serious money. Quad core at almost 3.6 GHz with FSB 1300 definitely tells you how the stuff will perform in the future. When we think about it, this is exactly what we expect from the Yorkfield, 45 nm parts when they appear in some six plus month time. I think that Quad core can do even more.

 

So we finally touched DDR3 speeds. Stay tuned for more as this is just part two.