EVGA's P55 Motherboard Lineup Revealed + P55 FTW Preview

The EVGA P55 FTW Under the Microscope cont.

Directly below the CPU socket area where the northbridge would be on older families of boards, there is a stylized and illuminated EVGA logo which pulses white when the system is turned on. To the left of this is the sole PCI-E x1 slot on the board as well as a Molex header for additional power to the PCI-E slots and a single fan header. Granted the PCI-E x1 slot isn’t perfectly placed for those of you who want to see that LED pulse its eerie glow but sound cards fit without a problem.


Since the P55 chipset on this board doesn’t produce a huge amount of heat, EVGA was able to make due with a smaller then normal heatsink. That being said, there is still enough surface area on this cooler to ensure that even highly overclocked systems stay within the prescribed thermal boundaries.


The EVGA P55 FTW makes use of 6 on-board SATA headers which are directed in such a way that any connected cables won’t come into contact with today’s extra long graphics cards.

One of the more unique features on this board are the integrated voltage read points. The read points include areas to check actual voltages for all the major sections overclockers look for: VCore, VTT, DIMM, PLL and PCH.

Meanwhile, the PCI-E Disable Jumpers (seen in the bottom right-hand corner next to the SATA ports) allow the user to disable any of the PCI-E slots in the event that a GPU suddenly goes out of commission. In their documentation, EVGA shows how you would be able to quickly diagnose which card failed in a multi-GPU, water cooled system without having to drain your loop and reinstall each card separately. We are sure overclockers will take advantage of this as well in certain cases.


As already mentioned, the expansion slots are well placed with the two grey x16 (mechanical) PCI Express slots being divided by the black PCI-E x4 slot as well as a single PCI slot. The remaining PCI slot is relegated to the bottom of the board. All of the PCI-E slots feature simple locking mechanisms to hold your cards in place.


The extreme bottom edge of the FTW houses a Reset button with a built-in HDD indicator LED, an illuminated Power button and a Clear CMOS switch. All of these are highly practical for overclockers but it is the tiny “BIOS SEL” switch that really caught our attention since it allows you to seamlessly change between up to three separate BIOSes. That’s right, the FTW houses three distinct BIOS chips and with this switch, you can actually compare one BIOS to the next without having to reflash over and over again. EVGA has also told us that you can use this to toggle overclocking profiles as well.

Continuing along the bottom edge, we can see the ubiquitous USB headers, the three BIOS chips (one of which is replicable) as well as the usual Dedug LED. However, this is no simple Debug LED since after the board boots into Windows this Debug indicator turns itself into a real-time CPU temperature readout.

Above the LED is the connector for EVGA’s unique ECP V2 control and trouble-shooting panel.


Yes folks, those are two 8-pin CPU power connectors hiding within the caverns of the MOSFET heatsinks. That means this board could theoretically provide up to 600W of power to the lone Lynnfield CPU…which is far more than any CPU will ever need, no matter how far you overclock it.


The backplate on the P55 FTW includes everything you would expect on a motherboard in this category and then some. There are 6 USB 2.0 ports, one eSATA connector (with one combo USB + eSATA connector), 2 Gigabit Ethernet jacks, a Firewire connector and a PS/2 mouse input. When it comes to audio, there is an 8-channel HD audio output, S/PDIF support (with both coax and optical TOSLINK outputs) and the usual mic and headphone jacks. Finally, there is a Clear CMOS button for those of you who don’t want to reach into your case to access this function.