EVGA P55 FTW Review

Chances are, the first thing you think of when it comes to EVGA is their graphics cards. After all, the company has earned a reputation for building some of the best GeForce cards money can buy.

But building kickass graphics cards isn’t all that EVGA does. As many of you know, EVGA is also making a name for themselves in the motherboard space.

At first EVGA’s motherboard efforts were largely based around NVIDIA reference board designs: EVGA merely slapped their stickers on the board, and shipped it out the door. The benefit to the consumer was that you knew you were getting a board that had been tested and qualified by NVIDIA themselves, and of course an even better value-add was EVGA’s excellent customer service and support: EVGA’s after purchase support is legendary. Not only does EVGA provide toll-free phone support, their online forums are actively monitored daily by EVGA support employees. Over the years I’ve seen cases where they cross-ship RMA’ed products when a new GPU or motherboard first comes out, although officially the company maintains that they don’t offer cross-shipping (I think they had a problem with some people abusing it).

In the last two years EVGA’s motherboard team has begun to step out of the reference board box, coming up with unique designs of their own. In 2007 EVGA picked up a number of ex-EpoX engineers, who worked on many of their non-reference designs for the nForce platform.

For those of you who don’t know, back in the days EpoX, along with ABIT, were the two leading motherboard manufacturers among hardcore overclockers and enthusiasts. From a pure hardware perspective, EpoX built some great boards, but they were ultimately doomed by poor marketing and support.


Beginning last year with the X58 chipset, EVGA enlisted the services of master overclocker Peter Tan, aka “Shamino”. Shamino played a key role in the design of EVGA’s X58 SLI Classified, and now heads up work on their latest high-end motherboards.

The X58 SLI Classified is EVGA’s flagship motherboard, with its integrated NF200 chip, it sports 4 PCI Express graphics slots with full support for 3-Way x16/x16/x16 SLI plus a dedicated GeForce card for PhysX+PCIe audio, and is loaded with the latest features for overclocking. To this day, the X58 SLI Classified holds all the world records in 3DMark 03, 05, 06 and Vantage for overclocking.

With their EpoX roots, and now a world record-breaking overclocker at the helm, you can bet who EVGA’s targeting their latest motherboards towards: the gamers and hardware enthusiasts who love to overclock.

For their latest high-end P55 motherboard, the $220 P55 FTW, EVGA incorporates many of the same features found in their $400+ X58 SLI Classified. Considering the success EVGA’s already enjoyed from the X58 Classified, this should make the P55 FTW an instant hit right? Let’s find out…