eVga-nforce-750i-sli-ftw

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SKU: 123-YW-E175-A1
Manufacturer: eVGA
MSRP: 179 USD

Face it, how many of you have been yearning and looking at the new nForce 780 and 790 mainboard ? Heck even 680i is still pretty sexy. There all just really expensive aren't they ? The one product that does offer the overclocking performance of the above mentioned mainboard however is less attractive as it was stripped of numerous features and comes in that fugly green color, you know it as the nForce 680 LT.

eVGA however decided to make a new somewhat cheaper mainboard opposed to 780/790, designed it l33t, sexy yet offer two or maybe three features less than these sub 300 USD counterparts. They named their new baby the eVGA nForce 750 FTW. Where FTW literally means "For The Win". Now if you send a product with "FTW" in the actual name then as a company you need to have some pretty big balls, as any reviewer will test until they faint to see if that product lives up-to the reputation. You know what, they need balls as big as an NVIDIA colored bull.

But man granted .. eVGA surely knew what they where doing. Without further ado let me introduce to you guys the new The EVGA 750i SLI FTW, designed for enthusiasts with a price in mainstream segment, a mainboard that has solid state capacitors with 6 phase power design to achieve the stability of extreme FSB and memory overclocking. EVGA brands the 750i SLI FTW “For the Win”.

With a pricetag around $179.99 check out some of it's features:

• Extreme overclocking speeds supporting 1600MHz FSB and beyond.
• 6 phase power design for the stability and performance.
• Solid state capacitors allowing better overclocking and stability.
• Easy troubleshooting features with on-board CMOS Reset button.
• Extreme DDR2 speeds of 1066MHz and beyond.
• Intel Socket 775, 45nm CPU Ready (Yorkfield & Wolfdale)
• Right-Angled SATA-2 Ports, RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 5, JBOD
• NV SLI Certified. PCI-E 2.0

That's right man, it's Intel Penryn ready, can do SLI, overclocks highly and just looks downright sexy. What's the difference with the nForce 780 you aks ? Well, the third SLI PCIe connecter, one Ethernet connector. EPP BIOS and a four SATA port castration. But really ... that's roughly it man. Oh and it's roughly 100 bucks cheaper, which never sucks.

The best thing yet .. I mentioned this in our 780 and 790 review already, what I always have missed is a CMOS reset button. Dump that silly jumpe, we want a button. And you guessed it already; it's integrated. <- insert little heart smiley here.

Have a peek guys and gals, after which we'll walk through the technology you get to play around with. Obviously we'll do an extensive overclocking session as well. It literally took us 10 seconds to oveclock a Core 2 Quad Q6600 (2,4 GHz) towards 3,6 GHz on air cooling. Aah ! Can you tell I'm excited ?

Okay then, to be able to understand eVGA nForce 750 FTW we need to explain to you what it is and what it isn't and I can do that really simple for you.

No matter how and at what angle you look at it, this mainboard is based on the nForce 780i (with an i for Intel) SLI chipset. The product is based on a 6 layer PCB; and consists of three discrete chips; the first two known as the 750i MCP and the 750i SPP, also called North and South bridge's as is more commonly accepted. The third being the tiny nForce 200 chip. The NVIDIA nForce 200 chip is nothing more than a PCI Express switch chip with one upstream port and up to four downstream ports allowing all your PCIe functionality at full or if preferred less bandwidth (4x8 PCIe lanes).

The SPP and MCP (the mainboard chipset chips) are fabricated on TSMC's 90nm process technology. The new chipset brings support for the latest Socket 775 processors from Intel:

• Quad Core Yorkfield & duo core Wolfdale (45nm Penryn)
• Current (Kentsfield) Quad core & Duo Core processors (Conroe 65nm)
• All LGA775 Pentium processors

The 750 is in fact a 780 yet with some features stripped away. The features stripped away are well .. not really needed anyway, but let's have a look and compare. We can do this pretty easily by comparing NVIDIA's internal block-diagrams of the architectural features.

On the left side you cans ee the nForce 780i SLI - on the right the 750i SLI chipset. First thing you'll notice, 750 does not have SLI memory, meaning no automated EPP features that set timings and voltages. A loss yes, but not a biggy as you can set these timings manually. Out of the box the DDR2 memory support is 800 MHz, yet don't worry. We had Reaper memory on our board running at it's default 1148 MHz just fine, remember eVGA tweaked this mainboard for extremely high performance versus stability.

When we move downward on the block diagram we notice that the MCP is missing a couple PCIe lanes. And hey, not needed as you'll have two PCIe x16 slots, not three and thus plenty of PCIe lanes available. NVIDIA however did want to make your system PCIe 2.0 compliant, so they have inserted a bridge chip called the NV nForce 200 that is responsible for creating 2x x16 PCIe lanes fully compliant with the 2.0 standard.

The new PCie 2.0 standard, brings a boosts to the PCIe interface. The total capacity of the PCI Express 2.0 bus is now 5Gbps, twice the old standard, and an x16 connector will now be able to achieve transfers as high as 16Gbps. It is backwards compatible with PCIe 1.1 cards, making it simple for motherboard manufacturers to transition to it in the future. Cool stuff, yet it's so high-end that at this time you will just not notice a performance difference. The latest G92 graphics cards already have 2.0 compatibility though.

The rest that was stripped away is the more insignificant stuff. One GBit/s Ethernet port instead of two. 8 USB 2.0 ports instead of 10, no ESA certification. And though this one I find a bit of a lack luster, 4 SATA connectors instead of 6.

Now despite a good number of stripped away features, eVGA did it's best to compensate that by making a 100% enthusiast platform, the FTW edition. This mainboard is a good upgrade over the nForce series 6 mainboards. The industry has been moving forward and we now see slow adoption of PCIe 2.0, new Intel Penryn (45nm) Core 2 processors are slowly being released. Touching the subject of Intel's new Penryn processors. The nForce 750i SLI mainboard, as opposed to 680i, is fully compatible with the new Intel 45nm Duo & Quad core processors, but only the 1333 MHz processors are actually 'officially' supported.

But again, this is the FTW edition, if your processor can take it, you could even force a 1800 MHz FSB pretty easily. That is just no limit .. this is the stuff the mainboard was designed for. As our overclock chapter will show you, we even overclocked a 2400 MHz Core 2 Quad processor Q6600 (2400 MHz) towards 3600 MHz in less than 10 seconds.

Overclocking & Tweaking

I've mentioned a couple of times already that the FTW edition mainboard is built for very decent overclocking. The BIOS is highly flexible for this and allows some very predominant tweaking when it comes to multipliers, voltages and settings.

To gain maximum performance and stability I've inserted some nice fast OCZ Reaper memory to show that the mainboard indeed can take faster than 800 Mhz memory perfectly fine.

And granted, there's nothing more easy than overclocking with this mainboard. So I figured, the cheapest quad-core Intel processor right now is the Q6600 at 185 USD, an amazing price and that is our sweet spot. Especially if you consider that they are very overclockable.

So we inserted a Core 2 Quad Q6600 processor on this mainboard. Now; I could have used our 1400 USD Core 2 Extreme QX9770 for this, but overclocking an Intel Engineering Sample processor .. wouldn't be entirely fair. What we use is a retail version Q6600 processor paid for by my own money.

Cooling wise, we're trying to make a point here. While not spending heaps of money you can lift this platform to the very high end. So we used a 35 USD OCZ Vendetta cooler which I really like. Cheap, not noisy and really decent performance.

In the BIOS you want to disable functions like CE1 and SpeedStep, make sure your memory is set asynchronous from the FSB yet at it's maximum frequency with optimal timings (and give it a little extra voltage, that's always good, usually 2.1v - 2.2v for DDR2 is a sweet-spot.

Now usually on a regular mainboard you'd end up at roughly 3 GHz to 3.2 GHz on a Core 2 Quad Q6600 quad-core right ?

Here's what I did, remember .. first try .. I put the FSB to 1600 MHz, the multiplier to 9 and furthermore did noting, no voltage increase noting. Everything was set to automatic in the BIOS except the variables mentioned above. Et voila .. a stable 3600 MHz on all four cores. We boot into windows and already have a perfectly nice overclock.

With the OCZ Vendetta cooler temps where great, at 40 C idle up to 60 degrees C 100% utilized. Now testing with Prime95 was not 100% stable. after a few minutes we got an error. We now increase the voltage towards 1.4v in the BIOS, reboot .. and got a 100% stable error-free rig.

Overclocking is really easy with this mainboard. Imagine what you can do with, for example, some quality water-cooling. I took some screenshots of this with a Prime Stress test .

You can click the image to enlarge the screenshot and check temps, overclock and Prime95. We measured and overclocked at a 20 Degrees C ambient room temperature.

When we tilt the camera we stumble into the SATA and PATA ports with above it passively cooled the MCP chipset (Southbridge). Only four SATA ports, I find that a bit on the shy side, but this is an NVIDIA specced feature.

It's a little hard to spot but the grey'ish block just below the MCP is a diagnostic LED. This is a debug LED that displays "port 80" codes using two seven-segment displays. It was added for quick troubleshooting. I think that over 150 debug codes can be displayed. So if your CMOS malfunctions, or your memory has an issue, you grab your manual and seek up the error code. Now you know where to look and how to fix it.

Loving this, a small micro-switch to reset your CMOS fast and efficient. No more frustration with moving jumpers.

Here we have micro switches to reset and/or power up/down the PC. A tweakers necessity during his everlasting quest to overclock the memory and processor. A little bigger than usual, I like that. They are easy to reach, press and look at. And why am I saying that ? Look at the next photo.

These switches are embedded over a LED, displaying power on and your HD activity.

Power consumption

Alright then, let's monitor something besides performance... power consumption.

We'll now show you some tests we have done on overall power consumption of the PC, in several IDLE and PEAK states.

We crete three situations:

• 750i FTW with default clocked Q6600
• 750i FTW with 3.0 GHz clocked Q6600
• 750i FTW with 3.6 GHz clocked Q6600

The results show the wattage drawn from the PC, with the PC activated and at 100% CPU load, the four cores being fully utilized. We left the graphics card out of the equation here. So at full processor load the difference between the 2.4 GHz default clocked Q6600 and the overclocked version at 3.6 GHz = 56 Watts.

Not too bad actually, though energy consumption of modern age PCs are a growing concern.

The Verdict

Occasionally I get bitch-slapped by my editors for cursing a little too much in my reviews; but f*ck it, this is a nice mainboard guys ! The reality is simple; some features are cut away opposed to the 250-350 USD mainboards yet the rest is the same and some even better with this mainboard. In the past the 650 SLI series never was that good in overclocking, hey NVIDIA doesn't like to destroy it's own enthusiast market. But this 750i SLI FTW is just an exceptionally good mainboard if your mission is to tweak and overclock. It has everything we as enthusiast PC users want. It looks cool, even comes with multi-channel sound, including TOSLINK optical output, fantastic performance, the sexy diagnostic LED, and it has micro switches for power on/off, reset and now also CMOS (yay!).

Now I'm not saying that $179.99 is cheap for a mainboard, contrary .. it's still quite a sum of money for a mainboard. But the value you get here is just excellent. It fit's its segment perfectly and this little black demon even can handle the new Penryn Core 2 duo and Quad processors perfectly fine.

** Update -eVGA noticed that it's going to be quite a popular mainboard and upped their price towards $199 as listed on their website. Please try e-tailers for better prices.

Observations & recommendation; placement of the SPP (Northbridge) cooler. The SPP, especially when you overclock your PC, will generate a good amount of heat. The way the cooling is positioned is a bit weird, as all the heat is blown directly to the backside of the graphics card, this is not optimal. If the cooler was positioned 45 degrees clockwise the heat would be blown towards the read I/O panel where above it usually an exhaust fan is to be found. Also I find the fan way too loud, it's the one thing I did not like about the mainboard. You manually have to lower RPM in the BIOS for it to be acceptable.

We can confirm that 750i SLI FTW can overclock really well and has a lot of headroom for you to do what you need to do and that is additional value. See we clocked a Q6600 towards 3.6 GHz perfectly stable on a 35 USD OCZ Vendetta cooler. Again 3600 MHz, please check out what a QX9770 at 3.2 GHz will cost you okay ? A massive overclock of your system equals a better ROI - a return of investment. And I'm sure that a lot of you take overclocking a lot more serious than I do and achieve much higher results.

Granted though; the 750i SLI FTW is not a big update over for example the 680i unless you planned to fo for a Core 2 based 45nm Penryn processor, but it is the stuff that will get you seriously excited. The feature set versus value simply is good. The true success of the recent nForce 7 series obviously lies in platform stability while overclocking. Sure you need to have the best gear like PSU, memory and processor yet once you have all your components right, it's the nForce platform that will steer your system to new heights. Overclocking experiences like I just mentioned are the true reason why you should get the more expensive 750i/780i mainboards. And although really being an updated 680i, the nForce 750i FTW is a dazzling platform, not a soul on this earth will deny that.

If you are in the market for a new mainboard upgrade and don't have tons of cash to spend, there's another advantage to be found here. You'll not be forced to make the move to DDR3 and can keep your DDR2 memory. But even so, if you do need to purchase DDR2 memory then you are in luck. DDR2 memory is downright cheap at this moment, check out the 88 bucks costing 4GB Corsair kit for example. I'll opt it over 2GB DDR3 any time.

Next to all this we should not forget to mention eVGA's warranty. In the USA / Canada you'll receive a lifetime warranty upon registration of the mainboard. Outside the USA you'll still be eligible for a 10 year warranty.

So that's it .. I honestly have nothing but good to report about this little fellah. It's as simple as that. You'll love it and that's all there is to it.

Guru3D final thought: Yeah the 750i SLI FTW went 'for the win' .. and it struck gold. It wins our 'best hardware award' it deserves nothing less. Newegg has them avaialble right now for $189.99

Copied from guru3d. http://www.guru3d.com/article/evga-nforce-750i-sli-ftw-for-the-win-review/14

Nice MOBO indeed .. hehe