14 - The Conclusion

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