EVGA Z68 FTW review

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Finals Words and conclusion

 

Finals Words and conclusion

You know, when you review as many motherboards as we do, at one point the really great stuff tends to get a little common -- that's a little dangerous as we should never take stuff for granted. eVGA managed to release a superb motherboard with the FTW edition. Admittedly the competition in the Z68 segment is stiff, very stiff. Look at the motherboards from MSI, Gigabyte and ASUS for example. All of them have products in the same price range but probably offer a little more when it comes to overall features.

We find the number of USB 3.0 ports on the rear IO a little sober, as well as the sheer number of onboard SATA3 connectors. eVGA might also need to be on the lookout of changing the design a little, nothing much has changed ever since their X58 Classified release back in early 2009. Now if you look at say a Maximus Extreme-Z from ASUS and this motherboard (both priced similar + both have NF200) well, that's what eVGA has to battle. So we feel that the looks of the motherboard could be improved a little here and there to be able to keep up with forces like ASUS. Hardware wise you get what you pay for though, the motherboard offers baseline performance comparable to reference P67 and Z68 motherboards. I do need to address one thing here on baseline performance. You will have noticed that the default baseline performance of the FTW is lower than the Z68 performance you can see on the latest ASUS and Gigabyte motherboards. Typically when you stress a Core i7 2600K on all cores the turbo mode will set one core at 3500 MHz, one at 3600, one at 3700 and one at 3800.

Manufacturers like Gigabyte and ASUS are changing that (at least on our tested boards) so whenever the cores are in use, they will ALL peak to 3800 MHz. If you have another brand motherboard, look up in your BIOS, as in each and every motherboard BIOS you can select and configure the turbo multipliers manually with a K model processor. Now you can easily configure this yourself in the eVGA BIOS, but eVGA follows the traditional and official Turbo bin mode, benchmarks wise that's exactly why you see so many performance differences lately.

eVGA also moved onward to an uEFI BIOS. Much like other manufacturers it's complete, yet average to use. It seems a tough cookie to deal with for most manufacturers. eVGA offers a some sort of emulated old style BIOS under uEFI, it can use some improvement on the GUI alright, but tweaking and overclocking wise you'll find everything you'll ever need, and that's a big plus.

Overclocking itself was a breeze, you can manually select how to overclock, preferably you simply increase the Turbo multipliers and find a corresponding stable CPU voltage with it. We have a two anal 2600K processors, our limit on this processor is varying from 4800 to 5000 MHz differing per motherboard. With this eVGA motherboard we had a stable 4.9 GHz and as you have seen we included the results in our benchmark suite. Superb cooling and better yield CPUs will no doubt go higher easily on this motherboard.

Features wise as stated we'd have loved to see some more USB 3.0 and SATA3 ports, but really that's all we can nag about. I also understand that some will regret seeing only PCIe slots and no PCI slots, that's personal though. But other then that the motherboard is very complete and well built. Two NICs, easy CMOS clear switches, power/reset buttons, debug / status LED, six PCI Express x16 slots, along with a number of jumpers that can disable one or more of them (handy in extreme overclock sessions). And then simple stuff like dual of 8-pin CPU power connectors 90 degrees angled 24-pin power plug and features like triple BIOS.

Where the motherboard stands out though is the fact that eVGA makes use of an NVIDIA NF200 bridge chip that makes 3-way SLI or Crossfire configurations an option. The cards will still run in x8 PCIe lanes each though..

Before I hit the closing line, let me mention that (if I noticed it right) there are three SKUs available for the FTW edition Z68 motherboard. You have the regular FTW (though the word regular does not seem justified here), and then two version with optionally EVGauge (shown in the product gallery) but also a version with the ECP V4, which is an drive bay control unit (was not included in our package).

In all my Z68 reviews I say this, if you are not interested in Intels SSD caching and/or LUCID Virtu mode, you could just as well save a little money with a P67 motherboard. Same stuff, same performance same features. eVGA has an FTW model here as well.

guru3d-recommended_150px.jpgIn conclusion we can say that the eVGA Z68 FTW is a really nice product priced competitively. We do think that eVGA should look a little more at overall aesthetics as hey, it matters alright. The hardware itself works out extremely well, it is a board that will satisfy any computer enthusiast or hardware entrepreneur. We can wholeheartedly recommend it.

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