EVGA's P55 Motherboard Lineup Revealed + P55 FTW Preview

The EVGA P55 FTW Under the Microscope

Even though the FTW is one of the higher-end P55 boards available from EVGA, it sticks to the standard ATX form factor. The PCB sticks with the usual black color but that is where the similarity with past EVGA motherboards ends. Instead of going for an oddball mixture of black, blue and green from the X58 SLI family or a red and black “Classified” color scheme, this board goes straight down the monochromatic path. There is liberal use of black with a few shades of grey inserted here and there which is perfect for those of you who don’t want your motherboard to cry out “look at me!” This color scheme also means that the red USB headers and Power On button stand out like sore thumbs.

There really doesn’t seem to be any faults here when it comes to the overall layout as all of the PCI Express slots are placed far enough apart to avoid issues when installing dual slot GPUs. Meanwhile, the legacy PCI expansion slots are pushed closer to the bottom of the board. The six system fan headers are mostly concentrated towards the topmost portion with four of them clustered around the memory slots, one next to the I/O ports and one near the SATA ports.


The area immediately around the CPU socket area is devoid of any obstacles which would prevent the installation of a large CPU heatsink. The proximity of the solid-state capacitors on two sides of the CPU socket could cause some headaches when insulating for LN2 or other exotic types of cooling. On the other hand, the vast expanses of open PCB on the other two sides of the CPU are an extreme overclocker’s dream come true.

The P55 FTW uses a 12-phase power design for the CPU with a maximum PWM frequency of 1189KHz while an additional 2 phases are dedicated for the VTT. As we have seen in the past, the MOSFET heatsinks on modern motherboards seem to be getting larger and larger and EVGA has done nothing to turn away from this trend. Luckily, these hulking towers of black-painted aluminum are designed in such a way that they will take full advantage of in-case airflow to cool off the hot-running MOSFETs.


If we zoom in on the CPU socket a little closer, we can see what EVGA calls their DPHS (Double Play Heatsink Support) that supports both LGA775 and LGA1156 CPU heatsink offsets. While many higher-end manufacturers such as Noctua will be offering free LGA1156 upgrade brackets for their cooling products, we are sure that there will be many of you who will be stuck with an LGA775-only supporting heatsink. While we have to question the durability of this solution when taking into account the mounting pressure needed for an acceptable mount, it is still a great addition.


Beside the CPU socket we have the usual location for the DDR3 memory slots which carry on the black / grey theme which is present everywhere else on this board. EVGA has stated that their FTW should be able to sustain memory overclocks of above 2600Mhz (DDR) while supporting up to 16GB. This impressive feat is accomplished through a unique 3-phase power design which is dedicated solely for the memory.