EVGA’s Z77 FTW motherboard is built for extreme overclocking!
The EVGA Z77 FTW motherboard
Unboxing and Installation
The EVGA Z77 FTW motherboard comes in a black box and red is emphasied. This is a theme that is repeated on the motherboard and it is effective and visually very good looking. The box emphasizes Ivy Bridge’s features including USB 3.0 and Sata III/6G. It is PCIe express 3.0 ready to take full advantage of SLI (and CrossFireX).
Turning the box over, we see it advertise the EVGA motherboard’s features. Warranty is 3 years and it is suggested that the end user register online for an extension. The board is now identified by the serial number and the warranty is transferrable. The famous EVGA 27/7 support is proudly displayed and this Z77 motherboard is eligible for the 90-day step-up program. Eleet, the free windows based overclocking utility is also advertised and is included in the software on the driver CD.
And here also we see gaming performance stressed on the end panels.
Upon opening the box, we see everything is packed securely in a plastic clamshell and that there are a lot of accessories as befits a flagship motherboard. Here is everything right out of the box to show how well it is packed for shipping.
The motherboard comes in large anti-static “clamshell” packaging which is becoming popular. Unfortunately, there is a lot of material to recycle or trash and it is a large package to store. On the upside, it protects the motherboard and accessories very well during shipping.
Above are all of the accessories completely unpacked. Included are a manual and a installation poster-style guide along with a driver CD and Eleet overclocking utility.
If your case doesn’t have the latest connectors, a 4-port USB 2.0 bracket and a 2 port USB 3.0 bracket, as well as a FireWire 1394a bracket are included. There are two SATA power adapters, two each 3G and 6G data cables and there are 2- and 3-way SLI bridges. Of course, there is also the I/O shield.
The visual installation guide works well in practice and it might be helpful to also include a DVD video guide. The user manual is useful but it does not cover the BIOS at all. One of the most useful resources to take full advantage of your new Z77 FTW motherboard is the EVGA community. They have a forum section dedicated to the EVGA Z77 motherboards and some of the most helpful posters and dedicated staff anywhere!
Let’s look at the EVGA Z77 FTW motherboard:
The Layout
The EVGA Z77 FTW motherboard features 7+1 Phase PWM including dual 8-pin power connectors for the ultimate in CPU overclocking capabilities. Both of the 8-pin power plugs are easily accessed as they are located directly above the CPU socket.
We only used one power connector and was able to easily get stability at 5.0GHz. The second power connector would be likely used for extreme overclocking perhaps under liquid Nitrogen.
The POSCAP capacitors and now having three times the usual amount of gold in the CPU socket pins are also designed to help with overclocking stability. The PWM area has a heatsink that also covers the PLX PEX8747 chip. Because of the intelligent layout, there is room to install large CPU coolers such as our Noctua NH-DH14 as well as for installing multiple large video cards.
In addition to supporting Intel Socket 1155 CPUs, the Z77 FTW motherboard boasts five PCI-e 3.0 x16/x8 slots and one PCI-e 2.0 x1 slot, making it one of the rare boards that is suitable for up to four-way SLI or CrossFireX while using an additonal slot for PhysX – that’s four video cards running simultaneously. You can even disable various PCI-e lanes with onboard switches located above the SATA ports.
The are slots for 4 DIMMS of DDR3 up to 32GB total. This motherboard supports the stock 1600MHz setting as well as overclocking the RAM to 2133MHz. Beside the DIMMs is the reset switch which is ideal for open benching and testing. Next to the reset switch, the debug LED is very conveniently placed and very easily visible through most cases’ clear side panel which is especially important since it doubles as a CPU thermal monitor.
You can easily read the average CPU core temperature directly which is partly made possible by moving the ATX power connector to the side of the motherboard so that the power cable is inserted at 180 degrees to the board, instead of the usual 90 degrees. Of course, you are probably going to need a full-sized tower or a oversized mid-tower to accomodate this FTW motherboard and the cables.
At the bottom of the board is a PCIe power connector (above, bottom left edge) which also inserts 180 degrees to the motherboard and an additional PCIe power connector above the PCIe slots (below, red arrow). Using one of them is mandatory for running more than one video card and two are provided for when extra stability is needed.
Below the ATX power connector are the PCIe switches which allow individual slot to be turned off and on. This would probably be useful for troubleshooting SLI or CrossFire configurations. Below the PCIe switches are four SATA 6Gbps connectors and there are total of ten additional SATA 3Gbps ports including two eSATA. You can actually have 14 SATA devices connected at one time. USB is also well-provided for with ten USB 2.0 ports and six USB 3.0 ports.
The the onboard USB 3.0 header and the bottom USB 3.0 ports closest to DisplayPort connector on the I/O panel are native to the Intel Chipset. As well as the USB and eSATA ports, are included a PS/2 port (which is great for some keyboards), as well as a clear CMOS button for convenience, mini-Display port, optical port, dual LAN ports and five audio jacks. One of the things we disliked on the ECS motherboard was that it was very inconvenient to clear the CMOS; the motherboard’s only jumpers are covered by an add-in video card.
Other features include a jumper (image above, from EVGA’s site) to shut off all of the LEDs except for the debug, and a toggle switch to select from three BIOSes. If one BIOS gets corrupted, it is quite easy to flash it from a good BIOS. This is an excellent feature for users who push their hardware to the limit.
SLI/CrossFire
Using the PLX chip, the FTW motherboard is x16/x16 when using PCI-E Slots 2 and 4. EVGA designed the board layout in such a way that a single GPU will get PCI-e lanes directly from CPU when in PCI-e Slot 1. The PLX bridge chip is used in 2-Way, 3-Way and 4-Way SLI configurations.
One thing that we didn’t like was that by using PCIe Slots 2 and 4, the cards were too close to each other and there were thermal issues with running EVGA GTX 660 Ti Superclocked video cards in 2-way SLI. Although slots 2 and 4 are not quite as close as a regular X58 motherboard, for example, we still needed to install a 240mm side case fan into the side panel of our Thermaltake Overseer RX-I full tower to cool our multiple video cards.
Of course, by moving the cards further apart, we cooled them off now, but we are now getting x8/x8 PCIe 3.0 bandwidth instead of the full 16x each supplied to slots 2and 4. We used slots 1 and 4 but you can certainly use 1 and 3. The difference in running Vantage was 30918 for a single x16 GTX 660 Ti and 43905 using x16/x16 PCIe bandwidth versus 43626 using x8/x8 slots in Vantage which is almost no difference at all. PCIe 3.0 x8 bandwidth should not be an issue unless you are running two GTX 690s in Quad-SLI.
Another great feature of the FTW motherboard is that everything is very well marked on the motherboard and even the DIMMs are clearly identified. If there is any doubt, the setup guide and the user manual can be quite helpful. And of course, the EVGA forum community is a wealth of easily accessible information.
This is the EVGA Z77 FTW motherboard from the other side (below). Everything about it is “heavy duty” and well-built for overclocking.
The EVGA Z77 FTW is a very attractive motherboard. We installed our CPU and RAM first and then installed our FTW motherboard into our Thermaltake tower Overseer RX-I. Originally we used a Noctua NH-DH12 which had plenty of room inside the case and it fit easily over the RAM with no issues.
Installation
Using the FTW motherboard we had a totally painless installation with the Noctual NH-DH-14 and then with Thermaltake’s Water2.0 Pro CPU watercooler. The Thermaltake Water2.0 Performer and Pro will both be featured in an upcoming “Air vs. Water” shootout with the NH-DH14 this week. As much as we love the amazing Noctua NH-DH14, we like the uncluttered look of the watercooling setup.
We have everything set up. Let’s turn our PC on and head for the BIOS.
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