EVGA Z370 Classified K Review
Test Setup
EVGA Z370 Classified K
Intel Core i7-8700K
Corsair LPX 4000MHz
Corsair LPX 3200MHz
Corsair MP500 M.2
nVidia GTX 980
Corsair HX1000i
Corsair H110i GT
Corsair ML Fans
Overclocking
Oh boy, talk about opening a can of worms. Depending upon your requirements the EVGA Classified is either one of the very best overclocking motherboards around, or one of the worst.
The BIOS is easy to negotiate and, to some degree, it does exactly what you would expect. Unfortunately the loadline calibration is totally borked, which means that we could get some seriously impressive CPUz screenshots of overclocks higher than you would attain from the majority of Z370 motherboards, yet the voltages were so unstable that it either fell over at the slightest hint of a benchmark, or the temperatures soared so high that we had to neuter it just to be able to get through the entirety of our test suite. Even in a stable state there was still a wild amount of fluctuation which you’ll see in our forthcoming graphs.
-EDIT-
It turns out in EVGA BIOS when you enable their version of load line calibration (they just call it Vdroop) you are basically turning ON vdroop and in the exat opposite to all other brands you disable the option to make it better. So the auto option is actually disabled and enabling it makes the board droop from 1.3v to 1.22. Its utterly backwards and caused us a lot of confusion.
Something in the BIOS (probably a hidden setting) is too high though because we found the board to be 6-10c hotter on average than other boards at the same volts / clocks.
