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- Date:
- Wednesday, October 29, 2008
- Author:
- Daniel Dobrowolski
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
EVGA 790i SLI FTW Motherboard
EVGA brings us their latest in its “FTW” motherboard series. EVGA promises that this one is engineered For The Win! Is this marketing fluff or is it the truth? A trip to the “cooker” will tell us how tough it is.
Introduction
EVGA is a name that is well known to video card enthusiasts and has been gaining ground in the motherboard arena. EVGA has been in the video card business for some time but in the grand scheme of things they are relative new comers to the motherboard market. They used to just sell NVIDIA reference motherboard designs but must have felt that those reference designs were lacking in some way because it set out to create their own versions of these NVIDIA chipset based boards recently. EVGA took designs that had a few short comings and they dealt with those short comings head on and they've succeeded fairly well as we had good things to say about their 750i SLI FTW and their 780i SLI FTW boards. The 750i SLI FTW was a shining star in our book and certainly displayed a great value at the time we reviewed it.
The basic 790i Ultra SLI reference boards are solid and are vastly superior to previous 680i SLI and 780i SLI reference board designs. With that said there was still plenty of room left for improvement. The EVGA 790i SI FTW is essentially a 790i SLI reference motherboard with a twist. Those twists come in the form of much needed upgrades that take the 790i SLI chipset to the next level. These changes come in the form of 8-phase power, digital PWM's, all solid state capacitors and much desired added features such as eSATA ports, and additional SATA ports which the previous reference designs lacked when compared to other high end boards. Additionally the chipset and PWM's received much needed cooling enhancements to help round out the package.
The EVGA 790i SLI FTW is based off of the NVIDIA nForce 790i SLI chipset which has two components. An SPP and an MCP. The SPP is really the same thing as a north bridge while the MCP handles similar functions found in Intel's ICHxR series' south bridges. The SPP is a new DDR3 compatible design that appeared when the 790i Ultra SLI chipset based reference boards were launched. The MCP used with that chipset is essentially the same thing as the 570i SLI MCP that can be found on 680i SLI and 780i SLI reference boards and thus its' feature set remains the same as it was on earlier boards. Same number of SATA ports, same NVRAID, same nForce Networking controllers. The stepping is different but I am unsure what if any changes came about with the new stepping. Both the SPP and MCP are based on a 90nm production process. It would be nice to see a die shrink with these parts but that's not really EVGA's fault but rather NVIDIA's. I'm also puzzled as to why EVGA didn't choose to go with the 790i Ultra SLI chipset rather than the “plain” 790i SLI chipset. The only real difference is that the 790i Ultra SLI supports SLI-Ready memory up to 2000MHz DDR3 while the plain 790i SLI only supports SLI-Ready Memory at 1333MHz. Considering who this board is likely meant for, it would make sense to use the part binned for greater memory speeds if in fact the chipsets are binned out. Still EVGA claims that the board is capable of DDR3 2000 speeds on the box, so we may find that “Ultra’ is more of a name than a product.
In any case the EVGA 790i SLI FTW's feature set is virtually identical to 790i Ultra SLI reference boards sold under the EVGA and XFX names. However EVGA did add a JMicron SATA controller which brings the total number of internal SATA ports to 9 and also adds one eSATA port bringing the total number of support SATA devices to 10. The board also integrates two IEEE1394 ports, one floppy port, one EIDE port, 7.1channel audio, and two gigabit network interfaces. The EVGA 790i SLI FTW supports the latest Intel ® Core™2 Extreme Quad-Core / Core™2 Duo / Intel® Pentium® Dual-Core processor/Intel® Celeron® processors as well as older Intel® Pentium 4®, Pentium D® and Pentium Extreme Edition® processors. As with most motherboards made today, few components are required to complete a working system. All that is needed is an LGA775 processor, DDR3 memory modules, power supply, video card, and drives to make a functional box.
Main Specifications Overview:
Detailed Specifications Overview:
Packaging
The packaging is typical EVGA. The board is contained in a clear plastic shell with all the manuals, driver disks, cables and other goodies stored above the board. The box is the same basic really thin cardboard they've been using for some time now but it will protect the board well enough to get it home. We would like to see a box that is a bit more robust as the thin sidewalls in the box tear easily and make getting items in an out of it a pain in the ass. But our situation is likely different than yours in that we are trading off and moving hardware around all the time, so this is much more likely a “reviewers gripe” than anything that would bother you at home.
Board Layout
The board layout is excellent for the most part with very few problem areas. The PCB is a little crowded but that's due to the amount of integrated features that are typical of most motherboards these days. The only real problem I can really see with the board is that the top PCI-Express x1 slot is virtually useless as there isn't enough clearance to allow the length of most cards to clear the chipset cooler. Other than that I haven't really got much to complain about. The location of the onboard power and reset buttons is lousy but the location of the clear CMOS button is nearly optimal. Though I must say I'd prefer a button on the back of the I/O panel like ASUS, MSI, and Gigabyte are offering on some of their board models.
The CPU area looks really clean. The chipset and PWM cooling looks great and is very tasteful. It doesn't appear overly bulky and the CPU area remains relatively unobstructed as a result. With that said if my Apogee GT waterblock's mounting hardware were any larger, it simply wouldn't have fit on this board. So there may be some fitment issues with some cooling hardware but generally speaking its' clear enough for most applications. Even giant CPU coolers like the HardForum favorite Thermalright Ultra 120 Extreme should fit on the EVGA 790i SLI FTW without any issues.
There are four DDR3 DIMM slots that are well placed. They are far enough away from the chipset cooling hardware as well as any power cables or expansion slots. They are color coded blue and black to help denote proper installation to obtain dual channel memory operation. The memory sockets use a two-phase power design which should be more than adequate for maintaining memory stability.
The north bridge is in the usual place sandwiched between the expansion slots and the CPU socket area. The chipset cooler is on the large side, but it is nothing colossal. The chipset cooler is a heat pipe design that covers the PWMs, north bridge, and south bridge. The chipset is actively cooled by fan. The fan is fairly quiet but when it comes to noise that's a very subjective term. I've dealt with worse and while the fan is definitely audible on my test bench it shouldn't be that bad when the board is mounted inside a proper computer case. While running at stock and overclocked speeds the north bridge was more than slightly warm to the touch. It certainly won't burn your hands should you dare touch it while its' running, but it doesn't exactly run cool either. I feel EVGA could have done a better job with cooling the north bridge. Granted these chipsets do run hotter than most of the newer chipsets on the market. Even so it is hard to be impressed with most north bridge cooling after taking Gigabyte's monster EP45T-Extreme north bridge cooler for a test drive.
The south bridge is located directly ahead of the top and middle PCI-Express x16 slots and sits just behind the legacy EIDE port. The SATA ports attached to the south bridge are found just in front of the memory slots and almost at the bottom corner of the motherboard at its' edge. They are denoted by black coloring. The red SATA ports are attached to the JMicron controller. EVGA did make one mistake that I have always seen on their boards in that they do not use the newer latching style SATA headers on the motherboard (the latching headers have little holes in them to accept the nubs on the latching SATA cables that “lock” the cable into place). What makes even less sense is that EVGA always packages the newer latching SATA cables in their motherboard boxes. This is an over sight that has been going on since the 680i SLI days. This is something I'd really like to see EVGA get past as there really is no excuse for it as it is possible to damage the non-latching headers with latching cables or cause other issues.
The EVGA 790i SLI FTW supports the PCI-Express 2.0 standard as well as older PCI-Express 1.0/1.0a compliant devices. The board features three full speed PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slots which are ideal for 2-Way and 3-Way SLI configurations with NVIDIA's latest and greatest graphics cards. Two additional PCI-Express x1 slots are also present on the board however their placement is less than ideal for most cards and in fact the second PCI-Express x1 slot will most likely be blocked off as many of today's graphics cards require dual slot cooling solutions. Also present are two legacy PCI v2.1 slots for older devices. Aside from the horrible clearance issues found with the PCI-Express x1 slots the slot configuration is actually quite good and is optimal for 3-Way SLI.
This quick video by Kyle will give you a good look at what all is included in the package, the special features of this motherboard, and exactly what the board looks like with 3-Way SLI installed.
The EVGA 790i SLI FTW has the following ports on the rear I/O panel: PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports, 6 USB ports, 2 RJ-45 ports, 1 S/PDIF port, six mini-stereo headphone jacks, 1 optical out jack 1 IEEE1394 port, and finally one eSATA port.