EVGA P55 FTW LGA1156 Motherboard Review

A Closer Look at the EVGA P55 FTW

At the edge of the board, directly below the PCI slots you will find the power, reset, and clear CMOS buttons which are really quite useful when you use a test bench or run your motherboard outside of a case. We like that we don’t have to short pins with a screwdriver to turn the board on or clear CMOS and the buttons even light up and look pretty cool when the board is running.


Directly to the left of the power switch is the BIOS selector switch that can be used to change between the three BIOS chips onboard. We found this feature to be excellent for saving your butt from a bad BIOS flash or switching between tweaked settings when benching but it has limited use to most consumers

The rather large Fintek F71889F chip is the board’s I/O controller chip which provides the most commonly used legacy Super I/O functionality plus environment control initiatives such as H/W monitor and fan speed controller.


Just to the right of the I/O controller chip, we see a Realtek audio chip. The Realtek ALC885 chip runs the sound on the P55 FTW and is a high-performance 7.1+2 Channel High Definition Audio Codec with advanced lossless content protection technology. This protects pre-recorded content while still allowing full-rate audio enjoyment from DVD audio, Blu-ray DVD, or HD DVD discs.

Nearby we have two more chips, marked 88E8057-NNC2. These are Marvell Yukon Gigabit Ethernet Controllers and in short are your LAN chips and provide features such as Wake-on-LAN support and Marvell Virtual Cable Tester (VCT) technology.


Where the northbridge once was on previous boards, EVGA has added an LED which glows red with the EVGA logo when the board is in operation. We are not aware of any purpose this serves other than being a cosmetic feature.

Next to the LED, we find a 4-pin molex connector. Similar to the additional 12v power connector, this molex is intended to supply additional power when a user is doing high voltage overclocking. Specifically, the molex supplies additional power when running overclocked GPUs in SLI.


Taking a look at the PCIE slot layout we see EVGA has given plenty of room to run SLI and recommends using slots 1 and 3 (the grey ones) for dual GPUs to give the most clearance. Another card fits in the middle but it is very tight for dual GPU cards. In total we have one PCIE 2.0 x1 slot, two PCI slots, and three PCIE 2.0 x16 slots where PCIE 2.0 slots provide x16/x4 or x8/x8/x4 lane allocation depending upon your GPU configuration.

The rear panel gives plenty of options for your devices with six USB ports, one PS2 keyboard port, two ESATA ports, one firewire port, two Marvell Gigabit LAN ports and a full audio panel. EVGA also included a clear CMOS button on the I/O panel for quick access if the board is installed in a case. This makes three options for clearing CMOS which is very convenient.

So as you can see, the board has pretty much everything you would need, lots of nifty looking LED lights, good spacing and plenty of opportunity for adding additional things such as USB devices. The only things we can see that are excluded are IDE and floppy ports. A missing floppy port is no big deal since few people use floppy drives anyway but some users with IDE DVD drives may be forced to upgrade. Luckily you can get an SATA DVD drive for under $30 these days.