The Inquirer is reporting that Intel has scored a major board partner for its upcoming X58 platform: EVGA.  The longstanding NVIDIA supplier has apparently decided that there are greener pastures, and is signed up to start producting the next-gen platform.

 While it's old news that SLI will be enabled on X58 boards without the use of NVIDIA's proprietary nForce bridges, EVGA isn't completely forsaking their old friends.  In face, it turns out that the nForce chips will still be present on the board, allowing this X58 to run ATI graphics cards in CrossFire and NVIDIA cards in full triple SLI. 

The board offers 10 SATA ports, an eSATA, 8 USB 2.0 ports and everything else that's been shown for X58 hardware.  Thinking further about it, it's no real surprise to see EVGA make the jump to an Intel board; NVIDIA won'e be making X58 chipsets, and they'd be denying themselves of a potentially very large market segment if they followed along.  More importantly, EVGA is known in the enthusiast circles for offering quality support in the form of lifetime warranties and their infamous 90-day step-up program -- both of which will be brought to the new board as well.