EVGA 790i SLI FTW Review

ccokeman - September 28, 2008
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Testing:

To test the performance of the EVGA 790i SLI FTW motherboard I will be running it through a series of system as well as video gaming benchmarks to gauge the performance of the motherboard against some of the competing platforms. This is a way to show the upsides and downsides to a board when compared to the performance generated by the comparison boards. For the testing, all motherboards have been set at the factory default settings for the motherboard. The clock speed is manually adjusted to the default bus speed and clock multiplier while the memory has the sub timings set manually to minimize the variables that come into play with the settings on auto. Let's see if the 790i SLI FTW with its DDR3 memory will outperform the latest offerings with an Intel chipset.

Test Setup:

Processor: Intel Core 2 Quad 9450 @ 333 x 8
Motherboard: EVGA 790i SLI FTW
Memory: Mushkin Ascent XP3 16000 1333MHz 6-6-5-16 1t
Video Card: Palit Radeon HD 4850 w/ Catalyst 8.8
Power Supply: Mushkin 800w Modular Power Supply
Hard Drive: Seagate 7200.11 750GB SATA w/32MB Cache
Optical Drive: LG 16x DVD+/-RW
OS: Windows Vista Ultimate Edition

Comparison Motherboards:

Comparison Motherboard 1: Asus Striker II Extreme
Comparison Motherboard 2: Asus P5Q Premium
Comparison Motherboard 3: Gigabyte EP-45 Extreme
Comparison Motherboard 4: ECS P45T-A
Comparison Motherboard 5: ASUS P5QL-E
Comparison Motherboard 6: Gigabyte GA-X48-DQ6

Overclocking:

Overclocked settings:

Processor: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450 @ 450x8 = 3.60GHz
System Memory: Mushkin Ascent XP3 16000 1800MHz 8-7-6-20 2t

Overclocking the EVGA 790i SLI FTW was very similar to the Striker II Extreme. Both boards reacted similarly when pushed with a quad core CPU and high speed DDR3 memory. Overclocking the memory takes a little patience but can be done. On this board I was able to push the test memory to 2100MHz but just could not find the stability I needed. 2000MHz was where the memory would really play nice with the CPU and board. When the memory is run unlinked from the CPU there is a performance hit so I found the best compromise between the memory and CPU at 1800MHz (450MHz on the CPU and 900MHz on the memory) Linked and Synced. When run in this configuration the performance is superior to when the memory is run unlinked. I found this configuration to be Prime stable for everyday use. This means no blue screens or lockups to eventually cause hard drive corruption. In all, it took a couple of hours worth of testing the memory to reach the speeds the overclocked benchmarks will be run at. The only issue I have is that the adjustments are much courser than those of the S2E. Even so, the results are similar.