EVGA P55 FTW – Design

The P55 FTW is a dark and menacing looking motherboard. EVGA has gone with a black-gray theme with almost all their P55 motherboards. While the lath looks quite imposing, it does so without being covered in a maze of massive heatsinks. In fact, the cooling setup is very like to that of the Asrock P55 Extreme which is more than sufficient.

The P55 bit is cooled by a modest black passive heatsink located direct backside the SATA ports. The board'south 12 + ii ability phase is cooled by a pair of large black aluminum heatsinks, which are designed to receive air-flow from the CPU cooler. When benchmarking we found the motherboard cooling to be ample, even when overclocking to farthermost frequencies.

The EVGA P55 FTW provides iii PCIe x16 slots, though using two of these with either Crossfire or SLI technology will reduce its bandwidth to x8 each. The P55 FTW as well comes equipped with a unmarried PCIe x1 slot and two traditional PCI slots.

There is a version of this motherboard known every bit the 'FTW 200' that improves multi-GPU back up for iii-fashion PCIe x8 bandwidth, though information technology is considerably more expensive.

The primary and secondary PCIe x16 slots are separated past two slots though there is ample room that even a tertiary could take been included. This will permit for plenty of air menstruum betwixt Crossfire or SLI graphics cards on the P55 FTW.

These PCIe x16 slots are color coded gray, matching the EVGA dark theme.

The EVGA P55 FTW's lath layout is one of the best designs in our circular-up. The common DIMM slot/PCIe x16 connector disharmonize is not present and we plant installing/removing memory on this motherboard to be a breeze with a large graphics card installed.

The 24-pivot ATX ability connector is located in the superlative right hand corner of the motherboard where it is easy to access, and the eight onboard SATA ports have been mounted on a xc-degree angle to avoid any conflicts with long graphics cards. The CMOS battery is located betwixt the PCIe x16 slots making it difficult to access, but with the addition of a CMOS reset push on the I/O panel we can let this slide.

Speaking of the I/O panel, we have a PS/2 keyboard port, six audio jacks, optical and S/PDIF ports, dual eSATA, CMOS clear button, dual LAN ports and six USB 2.0 ports. With a farther six USB two.0 ports featured onboard we would have liked to see more make their mode into the I/O panel.

Like Asrock, EVGA has thought outside of the box by including support for both LGA1156 and LGA775 coolers with the P55 FTW. Rather than include a unmarried set up of mounting holes EVGA has besides accommodated for the older LGA775 heatsinks. Each set is clearly labeled either LGA1156 or LGA775 on the board itself to avoid confusion.

Some other characteristic that hits at the hardcore soul of the EVGA P55 FTW are the voltages read points at the summit of the lath, which allow users to adhere a multi-meter to read various system voltages. EVGA has too gone with LIC Capacitors (low inductance bit), another feature meant to help enthusiasts button their CPU to the limit.