Our regular readers should already be familiar with the EVGA nForce 750i SLI FTW mainboard, because it took part in the comparative power consumption measurements discussed in our ASUS P5N-D Mainboard Review. It was the most economical of all mainboards on Nvidia nForce 750i SLI chipset, if we could use this attribute about the least power-efficient core logic set composed of three chips. The review of EVGA nForce 750i SLI FTW was not the goal of that article, however, since the board was already put into the testbed we decided to check out its CPU overclocking potential. The board could only start at 425MHz FSB, so we didn’t praise it at that time.
We already had an idea of Nvidia nForce 750i SLI based mainboards, and our experience was not very positive overall, so we didn’t want to go into detail with the EVGA nForce 750i SLI FTW testing at first. However, a little later when we were working on our ZOTAC nForce 790i-Supreme mainboard review, we discovered some specifics of Nvidia based reference mainboards. This is when we suspected that our judgment about EVGA nForce 750i SLI FTW was not quite fair during that superficial test session and that the board was not that bad after all. That is why we decided to go back to this board in order to restore its good name and apologize for erroneous conclusions if we have to.
Closer Look at EVGA nForce 750i SLI FTW Mainboard
Looks like EVGA nForce 750i SLI FTW is a reference mainboard designed by Nvidia engineers. There are a few things pointing to that and if there were identical mainboards being sold under different brand names, it could be convincing evidence of this fact. The same exact thing happened to Nvidia nForce 790i SLI based mainboards, for instance. However, we couldn’t find any mainboards identical to EVGA nForce 750i SLI FTW. Other Nvidia’s usual partners such as ZOTAC and XFX, do not have any mainboards on this chipset at all, and ASUS, Gigabyte and MSI as usual introduced mainboards of their own proprietary design.
We added Gigabyte to this list by force of habit, however, we were really surprised to find out that they do not make any Nvidia nForce 750i SLI based mainboards. Very suspicious, that there are only a few companies that make mainboards on a relatively new chipset (Nvidia still don’t have anything replacing nForce 750i SLI in their lineup).
