EVGA Z68 FTW Motherboard Review

The EVGA Z68 FTW joins an elite group of motherboards aimed at satisfying the needs of overclocking, gaming and hardware enthusiasts.  While this group is small by comparison the things they look for in a motherboard can be rather specific and often difficult to plan for. 

Motherboard layout is quite good and virtually identical to the P55 Classified in placement of the components, graphic card support and onboard features.   Beyond that there are three very unique features found on the Z68 FTW that should be noted.  These would include the nVidia NF200 bridge chip to enable triple SLI support, a 90 degree right angled 24pin ATX power plug for better cable management and a single CF drive port.  The Compact Flash port is a nice touch but really should have been a Mini PCIe slot.  At least with Mini PCIe you could use a high speed SSD for drive caching or even install a HD video decoder.

Overall performance was exceptionally good and about what we would expect from a Z68 enabled motherboard.  The benchmark numbers were rather consistent across the board with the variances falling within the allowed limits or easily explained by our references systems using a factory overclock. 

We were a little surprised to see the EVGA UEFI BIOS implementation have a graphical header and classic black and white color scheme.  Of course if you remove the fancy colors and graphics the layout is identical to the standard AMI UEFI and really no easier to use. We can only hope that future revisions can improve where EVGA left off and really bring us some cool new features.

Overclocking the EVGA Z68 FTW was no different than any other Sandy Bridge system and the only major problem we ran into was sorting thru the UEFI to find the settings we needed.  At first look there appears to be no LN2 specific overclock settings and voltages need to be configured in mV instead of the standard decimal voltage.  However once you get past that, and make sure you are using the latest UEFI version (hint hint), you'll be on your way to a solid and stable overclocking experience.

Totally sweet color scheme
Full ATX motherboard
True Triple SLI Support
Voltage test points
PCI Express Disable Jumpers
Removable motherboard heatsinks
EVGauge Processor Utility
ECP Panel (on select models)
No PS/2 Port

UEFI could use some work to increase usability
CF Port seems out of place on a motherboard like this
No PS/2 Port