got my EVGA Z68 F.T.W Seems a very nice board

Well after my ASRock extreme 7 died on me I was considering either an MSI or the Asus Maximus. Until I stumbled upon the EVGA which was priced about the same as the ASRock (£210)

They seem quite rare over here now but the last EVGA board I had was a 680 SLI running a core 2 duo. It was an excellent board so when I saw the Z68 f.t.w in stock in the UK I just had to have one

So far no problems, keyboard worked first time (unlike the asrock where my g510 didnt work at all during boot up!), The bios is UEFI however still resembles an old bios interface which is nice if you like old school like me I actually have 3 bios's to play with at the flick of a switch and one of those is physically removable if I need to replace the actual chip. The PCIe slot layout is perfect as I use 2 580's in SLI with a big gap between them both and can still use my xonar sound card. It is an E-ATX (extended) so is as big as the Maximus.

I still need to get my water cooling set up again before I start overclocking but so far I'm very happy with it.

Here are some photos of the board, looks quite sexy I think

I'm a big fan of black PCB and the overall look is stylish as the red has been used sparingly and with purpose. I'm not ausually a fan of red but the combination of black and flashes of red works well here.

Nice looking board - post back with your clocked results and prove that it's not just a pretty face

There's also 6 red LED's next to each PCIe slot to show whether they are enabled. Yet more red I know but does look nice! (you can disable individual slots using jumpers which apparently is handy if you're cooling your GFX cards with LN2 for example!? ) I don't think I'll be cracking out the nitrogen any time soon though

It may lack a few little features of some of the other Z68 boards out there like fewer sata/usb3 connectors, also no on board DVI or HDMI outputs but it has everything I need and still has things like the NF200 Chip. I trust that being EVGA it will overclock nicely and remain stable.

I shall update with my OC results

R5GTT said:

I trust that being EVGA it will overclock nicely and remain stable.

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I'm sure it will clock extremely well as the SB chips are usually vey accomodating no matter what board they're in.

P67/Z68 motherboards don't seem to be a limiting factor anymore when clocking SBs (at least i haven't come across one) not like the old socket 775 MBs. But it's still nice to spend out on quality built board and get the extra features and BIOS tweaks. It's just a great feeling unwrapping a quality, newly released MB for the first time.

Does look like a nice board, if only I could justify upgrading my x58 build

Yes, and there are even less settings to tweak to obtain a stable overclock these days.
Even my Gigabyte X58-UD5 managed 4.2Ghz with an i7 D0 and was very stable.

I just hope my 2600K is a peach and doesn't require silly volts.

Fantastic, another board with the PCI-E 1x slot blocked by a retarded heatsink. Why do motherboard manufacturer's do this. I had to RMA a network card because of that on my MSI board and because of my x-fire setup there was no other spaces.

ajones32 said:

Fantastic, another board with the PCI-E 1x slot blocked by a retarded heatsink. Why do motherboard manufacturer's do this. I had to RMA a network card because of that on my MSI board and because of my x-fire setup there was no other spaces.

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That was the one good thing about the ASRock Extreme 7.....access to all of the slots.

Lovely looking board, one problem as pointed out, why is there a heatsing like a few Cm behined it? o_O don't really make much sense imo might as well not bothered

Had the P55 version, was a well made board.

Nice pics are always a bonus, bravo sir.

Gorgeous board.
Always been a fan of red & black boards.

And as Stulid has already mentioned some good pics.

Ta for comments on the photos.

The heatsink definately serves it's purpose, the 2 black heatsinks reach 35 and 40 degrees and the silver one as you can see in the photo pushes 50 when things are under load. I suppose they could have got away with a low profile heatsink with a heat pipe connecting it to the other 2 or positioned the heatsink better like the ASRock.

I could be wrong but doesn't the NF200 chip live under that heatsink as well?

4.6 GHz vcore at 1.35 in the bios. I Could probably get away with lower ie 1.3v or increase the clock a bit more but just got it stable for the moment while I try and sort my RAM speed.
For comparison Guru3D used 1.45v to hit 4.9GHz on this board but personally I wouldn't fancy going that high on the sandy and it certainly shouldn't need it.

I'm trying to tighten my memory timings. I have 16GB GSkill Ripjaws x which defaulted to 11 11 11 26 in the BIOS. Currently running at the standard speed 1600mhz but tightened to 8 9 8 24. Apparently this memory will do 7 8 7 24 but so far blue screening if I set it to that . I've upped the voltage to the recommended 1.6 so going to need to investigate further.

It would be nice to see 7.9 across the board

Very nice pics

For the memory clocking at OC'd speeds of 1600+, it is also dependent of the strength of the memory controller on the CPU. You can feed more voltage to the memory controller by adjusting the VCCIO setting (like VTT on the X58 platform) in the Overclocking menu of the BIOS. Also, make sure Internal PLL Voltage Override is enabled.

EVGA_Nick said:

Very nice pics .

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Thanks Nick, towards the end of yesterday evening I did increase the VCCIO just slightly and was able to get my memory to 1866MHz at decent timings. I just need to have more of a play and make sure it stays prime stable I've also been scanning the EVGA forum as there seems to be a lot of useful info on there too.

Great looking board there. I do like the red/black theme as it is subtle and not overdone. Wished I had gone for this instead of the ext 7 from Asrock.Will be interesting to see how your o clock progresses.

Mark

EVGA_Nick said:

Very nice pics

For the memory clocking at OC'd speeds of 1600+, it is also dependent of the strength of the memory controller on the CPU. You can feed more voltage to the memory controller by adjusting the VCCIO setting (like VTT on the X58 platform) in the Overclocking menu of the BIOS. Also, make sure Internal PLL Voltage Override is enabled.

Click to expand...

They look good boards Nick, so do EVGA do all design work? do EVGA manufacture the motherboards also?

Yes, all in-house designs just like X58/P55 Classifieds, SR-2, 580 Classifieds, etc.

R5GTT said:

It would be nice to see 7.9 across the board

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I get 7.8 on dual Hex core xeons, so good luck with that!