EVGA has built a name for itself inside the community of overclockers, gamers and other enthusiasts. Although they do not have the same volume as Gigabyte or Asus, they still put out some of the top boards when it comes to overclocking and performance. In fact as of this writing an EVGA Classified SR-2 Motherboard holds the number one slot in Futuremark’ s 3DMark 11 Hall of Fame. Unfortunately we do not have a Classified SR-2 in the shop for testing, but we do have an EVGA X79 FTW (151-SE-E777). This board features a matte black PCB, five PCI3 x16 slots and a lot more. So let’s take a look over the X79 FTW and check out both the design choices and features you can expect when you buy this board.
Features -
In the current market motherboard (and indeed almost all component) performance is very close. The days of a large performance advantage between boards using the same chipset are long gone. That is unless someone makes a HUGE mistake (like runs traces completely wrong). Now, the thing that differentiates different products is the features. These are things like power management, extra slots, better audio CODECs etc. It is these items that R&D teams work so hard to drop into what are really identical pieces of hardware at their most basic level.
Excellent -
POSCAPs over the entire board
PCIe kill swtiches
8- USB 3.0 ports on the I/O panel
SLI + PhysX bridge included
Now this list might not look like much, but it actually is. As we mentioned above EVGA is the only board that we have seen that has ALL polymer CAPs. We have seen them replace the majority of caps in the voltage regulation design, but never the entire board. It is very look looking to see though. The PCIe kill switches are not unique, but they are not all that common and will be a big deal to the overclockers and benchmarkers out there. The addition of a three-way SLI bridge that allows for a smaller GPU to be used for PhysX is a very cool option for gamers looking to grab that edge while the extra USB 3.0 ports on the I/O panel just round things out.
In the middle (sort of good) -
On board power, reset and clear CMOS buttons
Extra ATX and PCIe power
90-degree titled 24-pin ATX connector
Multiple BIOSes
This list is very specific to the enthusiasts and benchmarkers. If you are running everything on an open test bench then you want easy to reach buttons on the board just as you will want more power to the CPU and PCIe slots for better overclocking and benchmarking at those speeds. The tilting of the power connector falls into an enthusiast want as it helps keep your case clean and reduces air blockage.
Floor Mats -
Multiple 4-pin fan headers
Black PCB
Extra USB 2.0 and Firewire headers
The floor mats are just that, you can expect these from other X79 boards as well as boards with different chipsets. They might help get you to buy the X79 FTW, but if they do you were already leaning towards it very heavily. Bear in mind that this is not everything that the EVGA X79 FTW has as an option or a feature. It is just a listing of the ones that stand out and/or are already used as markerting items. We could spend quite a while listing everything that the X79 FTW has as a "feature" but that would get boring pretty fast.
