Also I want to say good review of this board. I own it and am not too happy with it. I hate the orientation of the NB heatsink and the fact it blows hot air on the card (like it'd be really hard to design a heatsink thats rotated 90degrees and is blowing the air towards the back of the case where there are perforated holes).
I also think its overpriced.
Reason why I'm asking about the BIOS is that the latest official bios is EZ1E however it introduced a huge hit in memory performance and this may be why its performing so badly in the tests. If you go back to SZ17 bios you will see much bigger improvements. However.. with the EZ17 there is a huge FSB hole in terms of overclocking with the E7200/E7300 as you cannot hit anything over 370Mhz FSB. SZ1E fixed this, but introduced the very slow mem controller issue. So its an ongoing problem.
Also, are you sure its x16/x8 in SLI? I thought it was x16/x16
Originally Posted by Bojamijams Which BIOS version was used for this board?
Also I want to say good review of this board. I own it and am not too happy with it. I hate the orientation of the NB heatsink and the fact it blows hot air on the card (like it'd be really hard to design a heatsink thats rotated 90degrees and is blowing the air towards the back of the case where there are perforated holes).
I also think its overpriced.
Reason why I'm asking about the BIOS is that the latest official bios is EZ1E however it introduced a huge hit in memory performance and this may be why its performing so badly in the tests. If you go back to SZ17 bios you will see much bigger improvements. However.. with the EZ17 there is a huge FSB hole in terms of overclocking with the E7200/E7300 as you cannot hit anything over 370Mhz FSB. SZ1E fixed this, but introduced the very slow mem controller issue. So its an ongoing problem.
Also, are you sure its x16/x8 in SLI? I thought it was x16/x16
I thought it was x8/x8 but the Nvidia documentation says x16/x8, so I went with that.
It's good to know about the BIOS thing (at least for others), cheers.
Another correction. Its actually x16/x16 in SLI. The performance hit you attribute when compared to the 780i is still based on the weaker memory controller with that bios version.
Originally Posted by Bojamijams Another correction. Its actually x16/x16 in SLI. The performance hit you attribute when compared to the 780i is still based on the weaker memory controller with that bios version.
low memory bandwidth and the fact that the NF200 chipset is forcing two x16 2.0 links into a single x16 (just like the 780i too). If you look at the memory copy speeds they are atrocious - this is particularly important to some games (so I've heard).
Is it possible to retest this board with the SZ17 bios? It would give a better picture as to its peformance and i'm rather curious how my overpriced board performs with a proper bios.
How come the multi-gpu performance with Crysis is only a slight increase in FPS versus the single gpu performance chart?
I have the 750i FTW with a regular EVGA 8800GT and plan on getting another 8800GT to increase performance. While the 9800 is not an 8800GT. This seriously concerns me, I can't spend 150 bucks for just a few more measly frames! Crysis is the only game where I have a noticeable slow FPS and choppiness.
Sorry the board didn't turn out such a good review for you guys.
Back when I bought it I was faced with no board with features/specs I really liked (whats wrong with some on board firewire!) with just an intel chipset, I hate ASUS's non-existant support/website. And my brothers and friends Gigabyte boards were DOA or dying just months after they got them. SLI seemed like a win for me as well, not having to buy the super expensive single-graphics cards solution. I remember being pretty cheaper than any 780i board as well....not just 20 bucks.
The only thing I'm disappointed in is that it's not a review for the 780i FTW. I saw "EVGA" and "FTW" on the mainpage and instantly thought "sweet, benchmarks on the 780i FTW!" Then again, you guys exist in the UK, so it'll be a while before you get that board.
I'd be really interested to see if the 780i FTW is just as win as the 750i.
Originally Posted by Bojamijams Is it possible to retest this board with the SZ17 bios? It would give a better picture as to its peformance and i'm rather curious how my overpriced board performs with a proper bios.
No, I just don't have time sorry. Otherwise I'd be here forever testing everyones BIOS' everytime a new one was released.
If you're buying a board based on warranty though - then EVGA is it, so that's a good decision. It's just a very rare one imo :o
Quick question - how many SATA cables does it come with? The review says 6 but the picutes show 4 ports and 4 cables. Is this just a little slip or is it some weird feature?
FIrst, I'm sorry about my average engligh wirtting skiil, but I feel good to write an aditional review of this 750i board.
I own one of this board once first week of may 08 and I very amazed by it's desing. It look very well designed, solid and with a proper cooling assembly. So, I've lived some few issues with this board: The north bridge fan is loudy and lack cfm. I had to replace them with a 80mm zalman fan @ 40% of 3000 it's 3000rpm (because at 100%, this fan is very loudy!!) You can had a 60mm fan with a good cfm, but I consider that is very important to have a chipset fan on this NB. It run very hot. at 1.40v @ 1700mhz.
Then, I found this board to be an average overclocker because it's not that simple to reach sweet spot between the fsb spped and the ram speed. Eg: if I put a 1700fsb, my ballistix 1066 cas5 ram doesn't work at 1020mhz - need to put them at 920. This even if I ajust the voltage of the ram at 2.25 -2.3 volts. Aslo at 1800 fsb, 800 ram cas 4-3-3-12-2-3 (because at unlinked mode, the pc don't boot anymore and need clr cmos!) the pc does random reboot. I will looking to do the vdroop mod and to better cpu voltage monitoring with a low resistance Fluke multimeter, because I found this board very bad on the cpu voltage management. I feel this board to drop the voltage very easely when a load is suddently put on the cpu. I've read on EVGA forum that the voltages monitored by the bios or by cpu-z is not the reality then people suggest to apply vdroop mod to resolve this issue... or to try to stabilise the voltage. I found this issue to be a big weakness on this board when you have want to do a nice OC. However, the SLI work flawlessly at pci2.0 16x on my both 8800gts oc.
My last board was an Asus P5B and I run my c2d 6750 at 3.8ghz 1700fsb without big modification... just bios voltages ajustment. The P5B board layout was basic compared to the 750i ftw and cost-me a bit more half the price of the EVGA. So, I don't understand why evga doesn't put little more effort -$- on the voltage regulation of the memory and the cpu when OC is applied to satisafy every user and to just make this board more satisfactory and a more valuable one for the price.
So th econsummer must paid for the support and warranty - EVGA know this!
My conclusion:
Pro:
Work very well at standard clock.
It's layout design
Decent heatpipe cooling
DUAL SLI running at both 16x
POST code display
Good stability at normal speed and average oc.
CON:
Weak and loudy low CFM NB fan
Weird voltage balance between system critical parts - NB - CPU - MEM when OC applied
SATA ports at 90 deg and soldered on a not pratical location
Average OC result
Some person may have lived video corruption with this board and some GF8-GF9 video adapter, which I never lived.
EVGA 750i ftw board with z1f bios
Core2duo E8400 @ 3.83ghz at 1.44volts- 1700fsb 1.40volts (BIOS)
4 X 1 GB Corsair Ballistix 1066 cas 5 at 850mhz cas 4-3-3-12-2-3 2.2volts
BFG 8800gts 512 OC SLI
2x 74GB 10k raptor in raid 0 + 1x 200GB maxtor hd's
Cooler MAster CM690 case with fan setup
620W Enermex liberty PS - Yes i'm borderline but my pc is very stable.
Vista64 ultimate in performance mode - no aero ****.
Comments 1 to 20 of 20
fixt
the oc'ing isnt anything speical either since basically every p35 board can do those speeds as well or more.
nice review, but the product just doesnt cut it with the heavy competition in the mainboard market.
Also I want to say good review of this board. I own it and am not too happy with it. I hate the orientation of the NB heatsink and the fact it blows hot air on the card (like it'd be really hard to design a heatsink thats rotated 90degrees and is blowing the air towards the back of the case where there are perforated holes).
I also think its overpriced.
Reason why I'm asking about the BIOS is that the latest official bios is EZ1E however it introduced a huge hit in memory performance and this may be why its performing so badly in the tests. If you go back to SZ17 bios you will see much bigger improvements. However.. with the EZ17 there is a huge FSB hole in terms of overclocking with the E7200/E7300 as you cannot hit anything over 370Mhz FSB. SZ1E fixed this, but introduced the very slow mem controller issue. So its an ongoing problem.
Also, are you sure its x16/x8 in SLI? I thought it was x16/x16
I thought it was x8/x8 but the Nvidia documentation says x16/x8, so I went with that.
It's good to know about the BIOS thing (at least for others), cheers.
Here's the word from an evga tech
http://www.evga.com/forums/fb.asp?m=320592
That's good to know if it is indeed 2 slots of PCI-E 2.0 16x!
It does make the gaming graphics performance look suspicious, however, as one would expect them to be very similar...
I have the 750i FTW with a regular EVGA 8800GT and plan on getting another 8800GT to increase performance. While the 9800 is not an 8800GT. This seriously concerns me, I can't spend 150 bucks for just a few more measly frames! Crysis is the only game where I have a noticeable slow FPS and choppiness.
Sorry the board didn't turn out such a good review for you guys.
Back when I bought it I was faced with no board with features/specs I really liked (whats wrong with some on board firewire!) with just an intel chipset, I hate ASUS's non-existant support/website. And my brothers and friends Gigabyte boards were DOA or dying just months after they got them. SLI seemed like a win for me as well, not having to buy the super expensive single-graphics cards solution. I remember being pretty cheaper than any 780i board as well....not just 20 bucks.
The only thing I'm disappointed in is that it's not a review for the 780i FTW. I saw "EVGA" and "FTW" on the mainpage and instantly thought "sweet, benchmarks on the 780i FTW!" Then again, you guys exist in the UK, so it'll be a while before you get that board.
I'd be really interested to see if the 780i FTW is just as win as the 750i.
No, I just don't have time sorry. Otherwise I'd be here forever testing everyones BIOS' everytime a new one was released.
If you're buying a board based on warranty though - then EVGA is it, so that's a good decision. It's just a very rare one imo :o
FIrst, I'm sorry about my average engligh wirtting skiil, but I feel good to write an aditional review of this 750i board.
I own one of this board once first week of may 08 and I very amazed by it's desing. It look very well designed, solid and with a proper cooling assembly. So, I've lived some few issues with this board: The north bridge fan is loudy and lack cfm. I had to replace them with a 80mm zalman fan @ 40% of 3000 it's 3000rpm (because at 100%, this fan is very loudy!!) You can had a 60mm fan with a good cfm, but I consider that is very important to have a chipset fan on this NB. It run very hot. at 1.40v @ 1700mhz.
Then, I found this board to be an average overclocker because it's not that simple to reach sweet spot between the fsb spped and the ram speed. Eg: if I put a 1700fsb, my ballistix 1066 cas5 ram doesn't work at 1020mhz - need to put them at 920. This even if I ajust the voltage of the ram at 2.25 -2.3 volts. Aslo at 1800 fsb, 800 ram cas 4-3-3-12-2-3 (because at unlinked mode, the pc don't boot anymore and need clr cmos!) the pc does random reboot. I will looking to do the vdroop mod and to better cpu voltage monitoring with a low resistance Fluke multimeter, because I found this board very bad on the cpu voltage management. I feel this board to drop the voltage very easely when a load is suddently put on the cpu. I've read on EVGA forum that the voltages monitored by the bios or by cpu-z is not the reality then people suggest to apply vdroop mod to resolve this issue... or to try to stabilise the voltage. I found this issue to be a big weakness on this board when you have want to do a nice OC. However, the SLI work flawlessly at pci2.0 16x on my both 8800gts oc.
My last board was an Asus P5B and I run my c2d 6750 at 3.8ghz 1700fsb without big modification... just bios voltages ajustment. The P5B board layout was basic compared to the 750i ftw and cost-me a bit more half the price of the EVGA. So, I don't understand why evga doesn't put little more effort -$- on the voltage regulation of the memory and the cpu when OC is applied to satisafy every user and to just make this board more satisfactory and a more valuable one for the price.
So th econsummer must paid for the support and warranty - EVGA know this!
My conclusion:
Pro:
Work very well at standard clock.
It's layout design
Decent heatpipe cooling
DUAL SLI running at both 16x
POST code display
Good stability at normal speed and average oc.
CON:
Weak and loudy low CFM NB fan
Weird voltage balance between system critical parts - NB - CPU - MEM when OC applied
SATA ports at 90 deg and soldered on a not pratical location
Average OC result
Some person may have lived video corruption with this board and some GF8-GF9 video adapter, which I never lived.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
EVGA 750i ftw board with z1f bios
Core2duo E8400 @ 3.83ghz at 1.44volts- 1700fsb 1.40volts (BIOS)
4 X 1 GB Corsair Ballistix 1066 cas 5 at 850mhz cas 4-3-3-12-2-3 2.2volts
BFG 8800gts 512 OC SLI
2x 74GB 10k raptor in raid 0 + 1x 200GB maxtor hd's
Cooler MAster CM690 case with fan setup
620W Enermex liberty PS - Yes i'm borderline but my pc is very stable.
Vista64 ultimate in performance mode - no aero ****.
my 3dmark06 best score / forceware 177.39
C2d e8400 @ 4106 mhz
SLI
750/1016
18470 3d marks
3666 cpu marks
1 Card setup
same cpu speed
14456 3d marks
3689 cpu marks