EVGA P55 FTW LGA1156 Motherboard Review

Voltage Regulation & Heat Analysis

Voltage Regulation:

When evaluating a board’s voltage regulation, we first need to know what a few voltages refer to. More specifically what the BIOS set VCore is versus what the VCore is in Windows and how things change when the system is put under load. In theory these numbers should all be the same but load line droop (commonly known as Vdroop) is an intentional part of any Intel power delivery design specification.

Droop by definition is the real voltage delta from idle to load on a motherboard. Vdroop is usually larger for quads due to the extra power going through the voltage regulation integrated circuits and some boards have larger Vdroop than others, depending partly on the quality of the voltage regulation of the board.

To analyze Vdroop and voltage regulation we usually look at how smooth the voltage line on an overclocked system is over a 5 hour period using OCCT and the degree of droop. However, OCCT does not detect VCore on this board so unfortunately we are unable to have the usual nice, clean OCCT-provided graph. What we can do instead is measure VCore with our digital multimeter and report the differences in BIOS VCore, idle VCore and load VCore.

First off, the BIOS setting – EVGA Vdroop Control is set to Without Vdroop which means the board itself senses and tries to level out any voltage drops that occur. Our 24/7 overclock of 4Ghz takes 1.350V set in the BIOS and in Windows this value actually increases instead of decreasing giving 1.364V at idle. Stressing the CPU 100% with the 8 thread Prime95, VCore increases this even more resulting in a reading 1.388V. Basically, most boards regulate things so the BIOS VCore is the highest, idle slightly lower and load is lowest, even with Load Line Calibration enabled. However, the FTW actually gives us 0.24v more under load than when idle which is interesting to say the least.



Heat Analysis:

Since the P55 chipset is brand new, there is not a whole lot of info out there on how hot it runs. You would expect that a passive cooled chipset that is doing multiple duties would get quite hot but we have to remember that Intel has moved quite a few functions onto the CPU die.

Measuring the Northbridge heatsink with a digital thermometer, temperatures hover around 40C even when the system is at full load. Some users like to water cool their chipset, but it really is not necessary in the case of P55. To put 40C in perspective, the human body temperature is 37C, so the P55 hardly runs hotter than we do even when it is working it’s butt off.


Before we get into CPU temperatures, we should add that the quad core multi threading Intel Core i7 860 is a hot running CPU. This is no dual Core 2 Duo we are dealing with here and many enthusiasts are even upgrading their waterblocks to the latest and greatest to deal with the heat. This is precisely why we stuck with a 4Ghz overclock although the chip would do more, temps were as high as we felt comfortable running 24/7.

The MOSFET coolers did a good job in cooling while not being overly how while the board didn’t really have any hot spots. As for CPU temperatures, 1.37V (full load) and 4Ghz stressed over five hours got us about an average of 68-69C which is really not too bad considering the additional voltage and clock speed increase. However this was watercooled so a user using the stock cooler will see higher temps and will be probably have to live with less of an overclock if he wants to keep temps around the same point. With low chipset temps and reasonable CPU temps we have no long-term concerns over heat on this board, as long as the user does not overdo the overclock without sufficient cooling.