EVGA Z77 FTW review

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Final words and conclusion

 

Final words and conclusion

The lads at EVGA have produced a very sweet piece of hardware. It's capable, extremely feature rich and offers anything an enthusiast PC gamer / tweaker would wish. Being an EVGA motherboard is just comes packed with features that appeal. The fact that EVGA Z77 FTW motherboard supports PCI-E 3.0 performance via a PLX 8747 PCI-E 3.0 certified bridge chip and thus can expand and manage four x8 PCie Gen 3 connections is a very good example.

The competition is tough, brand like ASUS, Gigabyte and MSI have equally strong products in their lineup. Each caters their own segment in the channel though. EVGA seems to target the real enthusiast crowd, and while I can understand that we also feel that it is a very small market to operate in.

We'd love to see a FTW motherboard that has a slightly more "gamers" design as my only remark really is the overall looks of the motherboard. EVGA did not step away from the design and looks they used say 2-3 years ago. IMHO thing could have looked a little more sexy with very simple things like better looking heatsinks and a better looking cooler.

The board could have improved a little bit more if it had used Intel NICs instead of the Marvell ones. But really, my remarks end there as otherwise, the FTW is one of the best boards we have tested.

EVGA Z77 FTW

 

If you are wondering why the baseline performance differs so much amongst the different brands... it's simple. EVGA sticks to Intel proposed turbo bins. Say 1 core has a multiplier of 39m the other 38, the other 37 and one 36. ASUS and Gigabyte for example with their high-end SKUs simply lock the Turbo frequency for all cores at 3900 MHz. This is the reason why you see quite a bit of performance difference. EVGA follows reference clocks. Obviously you can tweak this out in less then 30 seconds in the BIOS if desired.

The thing you need to understand is that the FTW motherboards are made for tweaking and that is where they really shine. If you like to OC the processor, well it's a simple deal ion the BIOS (or eLeet) really. If you use multiple graphics cards or want to overclock extremely on one or more of them, then you can use two 6-pin power headers to gain a little more stability. Quad SLI? No problem as you'll still get four x8 PCIe gen 3.0  links. All these factors combined make this a grand motherboard.

So when we look at overclocking and tweaking, well  this motherboard is champ. If you go for a manual tweak you may go as complex as you desire. It is important to know and understand that Ivy bridge processors like the 3770K used run hotter when overclocked opposed to Sandy Bridge once you pass 1.4 Volts on the CPU, reaching 4.6~4.8 GHz is fairly easy to accomplish with the motherboard at 1.30~1.35V though. Go higher and you'll notice that proper liquid cooling definitely deserves a recommendation, in fact becomes a requirement.

Our 2666 MHz memory from GSKILL did not kick in with the XMP profile, I'd like to hint to EVGA to look at that a bit better as higher-frequency memory is getting more popular. Manually inserting the timings however did make it work.

The uEFI BIOS is kept simple, no mouse control, no flashy graphics. In fact it resembles the classis BIOS really, albeit with black and white color tones. The settings are intricate though, you can ge really deep when it comes to tweaking. It definitely is a very strong selling point for this motherboard for the classic afficionados out there.

We again like to warn you that the board is EATX, meaning it's slightly larger then your average ATX form factor motherboard. Please make sure that your chassis supports a product of this size.

guru3d-recommended_150px.jpgSo let me wrap it up, aesthetically we feel the EVGA Z77 FTW can be a notch better. But hardware simple is done right with a near perfect layout. Multiple USB 3.0 connectors, many USB 2.0 ports, dual-Gbit NICs, plentiful SATA 2/3 connectivity, broad multi-GPU support thanks to an added PLX IX, DisplayPort, easy power/reset buttons all combined with a really lovely tweaking experience and the capacity to do so make the EVGA Z77 FTW a win. The product is not cheap though, expect prices of 329 USD / 300 EUR.

Combined with all the aforementioned features we think that the EVGA Z77 FTW is a truly excellent motherboard. To top it off, EVGA will offer you a 3 year limited warranty. Definitely recommended to the true enthusiast tweaker.

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