With the release of Intel’s new Lynnfield processors rapidly approaching, our testing room is filling with P55 motherboards at an alarming pace. It is more than evident that every motherboard manufacturer wants to get the jump on their competition by literally flooding the market with Lynnfield-supporting products from the moment the chips are officially released.

Among our stack of retail boxed P55 boards there stands a lone nondescript white box that holds the board we are previewing here today: an early production version of the EVGA P55 FTW. This is board is going to be in the higher-end range of their P55 line-up and has features a-plenty.

This preview will be a bit different from the other ones we will be doing over the course of the next few weeks. Naturally, we can’t show you any BIOS screenshots, performance numbers or overclocking results but what we can do is give you a quick picture tour around the motherboard. We can’t post detailed specifications or features for the time being either as EVGA would like to keep some of their game-changing additions under wraps until they are ready to fully unveil the board alongside Lynnfield processors. In such a highly competitive market, we can totally understand this decision on their part.

Speaking of EVGA’s line-up, we can promise you that once everything is said and done there will be no fewer than seven P55 boards available ranging in price from under $200 for the P55 LE to quite a bit higher for the upcoming P55 Classified. Anything more than $250 may seem a lot to pay for a Lynnfield-supporting motherboard but both the P55 FTW 200 and the Classified 200 will use Nvidia’s nForce 200 chip. Depending on the layout, we have seen boards where nForce 200 effectively adds the capability to run up to 40 PCI-E lanes when combined with the 16 from the Lynnfield CPU. There is an additional four already provided by the P55 PCH.

After we are done putting the P55 FTW under the microscope, we’ll give the rest of the EVGA P55 line-up a look by showing everything from an mATX board to some tantalizing details about the upcoming (and still under cover) P55 Classified. All in all, this should be an interesting little article so let’s get the show on the road.