Introduction

Anyone who has attended their share of LAN parties knows that you want to have a system that can impress others and play the latest games with high frame rates, yet still maintain a level of portability that keeps in stride with the idea of lugging around your computer from party to party. I know that when I packed up my system that was built in a Thermaltake Armor full tower case, that the weight and size of my system really made for an interesting and uncomfortable trip from the apartment to the car and then from the car to the third floor apartment where party was. It certainly made me think that it was time to invest in a portable LAN party system, if only to save my back.

The major problem preventing me from building such a system is the limitations of most micro ATX motherboards that fit into a portable LAN type case. The selection among AMD motherboards with decent northbridge chipsets has been rather disappointing, and the Intel boards have not shown much better selections. If you wanted to utilize SLI or multiple graphics, forget about micro with that idea in mind. All these wants and the limitations in micro ATX boards to meet these demands has really prevented me from building a LAN system, that is, until now, thanks to EVGA.

The EVGA Micro X58 SLI motherboard brings SLI and Core i7 technology to the micro ATX systems. The EVGA Micro X58 SLI features dual PCI-E and triple channel DDR3 memory support for excellent performance in a small package. With the introduction of this board to the computer market, LAN party systems with dual graphics cards and Core i7 technology are now within reach of the demanding gamer.