EVGA P55 FTW LGA1156 Motherboard Review

Conclusion

With one of the higher end entries into EVGA’s latest line of P55 boards, EVGA looks to be right up there with manufacturers such as ASUS with a fully featured board targeted to enthusiasts. At about $230, the EVGA P55 FTW easily competes with some more expensive boards in terms of what you get for the money; not to mention that comparable X58 boards are not even close to this price point. The FTW board has something for everyone in a motherboard price we are used to paying. Didn’t like the direction boards were going in terms of price point? We didn’t either so we must say that it is great to see a somewhat affordable enthusiast board hit the shelves, especially when the economy is finally on the rebound.

In terms of features it is hard to think of anything which is lacking. The ECP V2 allows everyone from enthusiasts to have a good amount of control over important aspects of overclocking and E-LEET gives you some great software monitoring / tweaking in a convenient Windows environment. To make matters even better, this board has some additional features such as socket 775 cooler mounting holes and triple switchable BIOS, which really allow it to stand out from the competition. For the hardcore enthusiast, the FTW has modes for extreme cooling, EZ voltage measure points to eliminate guess work when checking voltages with a multimeter, and a 12+2 phase PWM for the cleanest power switching you could ask for. Even a novice user has the appropriately-named Dummy OC feature which can give a significant boost in performance by simply changing one BIOS setting.

In our overclocking tests the board worked like a champ but we would expect no less from a product from EVGA. In general we felt that overclocking the P55 FTW was quite easy and painless and the AMI BIOS was well designed. For a 24/7 overclock we were able to achieve a 43% gain over stock speed for 4000Mhz, saw some nice memory overclocks at CL 7 and CL8 with our Ripjaws kit and were able to bench up to 220 BCLK at a reasonable VTT voltage. Unfortunately, it wasn't the board that was holding us back so it should be said that what we saw is just scratching the surface of the FTW's potential and it should really fly with some sub-zero cooling.

While there is no better feeling than slathering on the love from this board, there are still some small gremlins in the system. We found two minor issues with the BIOS: the first was the 2:6 memory ratio that did not seem to allow the board to POST when selected and it was more than annoying that we had to reset the clock and date after every CMOS clear. The 2:6 issue is really no big deal because 99% of users will not need that ratio anyways since with the speed of today’s DDR3, you will be using 2:8 and 2:10 regularly. The time and date resetting with a CMOS clear is however something we would like to see fixed. The only other minor issue we saw was that there are no IDE and floppy ports on the board. Yes, we understand it is 2009 and very few people use a floppy and those that need one can get a USB drive, but we feel that some users may still have IDE DVD or CD drives which they may want to use. That being said, if you are one of those people who wants to use a 4-year old CD drive with a board like this, we think it is time you move on.

In the end we found the EVGA FTW to be an excellent board, packed full of the features we want, at a reasonable price. For overclocking everything went smoothly and frustrations (which are common when overclocking) were virtually nonexistent which is more than we could ask of any board. The FTW should appeal to users from basic to mainstream to hard core enthusiast as it has something for everyone. For a user looking to save a few dollars without sacrificing much there is also the P55 SLI or for a power user that must have the absolute best of the best there is the P55 Classified but if you are looking for the best possible board for your money, it should be the FTW at the top of your list.


Pros

- ECP V2 and E-LEET make overclocking life easier
- Tri-BIOS adds convenience and safety
- Dummy OC works great and will be useful for a novice user
- SLI gave a huge boost in FPS
- EZ Voltage read points eliminates the guess work
- 775 cooler support
- Huge overclocking potential
- Value for the $$


Cons

- Have to set BIOS time and date after every CMOS clear
- No IDE or floppy ports
- 2:6 memory ratio did not seem to work

Thanks to EVGA for making this review possible!