Published in Reviews

eVGA 750i SLI FTW

by on19 May 2008

Index


Power-Consumption:

As expected, the results are bad. While the MSI X48 and the ASUS Extreme are using an IDT PCIe switch chip, which does eat about 10W, the nVidia chipset can top this easily. Due to the quite high voltage drop with high voltages, the gap widens the higher the overclock is.


Please note that other configurations may yield other results.

Image


Conclusion:


The price for the board now is about €170,- in Europe, so we get ripped off, as usual, compared to the $199,- in US.  For this money you get a nice layout, but you have to pay extra bucks for the high power consumption. The betting champ is its SLI support and if you don't need it, Intel-based boards will do you good.

nVidia failed to improve its chipsets, they just recycled an old chipset, paired it with a new companion chip and gave it a new name. There isn't much innovation. It would have been much wiser to cash 10 bucks from Intel per board and give them the SLI license and make the dual card thing more popular.

All that is not eVGAs fault. They really tried hard, and ex-Epox team has designed and really improved the reference design of the Nforce 750i motherboard.

The first testing tells us that eVGA 750i is actually faster than some tier one Nforce 750i, but we are still testing and we are not ready to post the final scores. We feel that the VRM needs more engineering to give stable operation while overclocking with high voltages but again we scored more than FSB500.

Besides that, they did a nice job. The main problem is the price, as P35 will sell for about €100 in a good motherboard and if you don't need SLI that might be a wiser choice; and the Gigabyte EP35C-DS3R that we reviewed two months ago is a good example. It can overclock higher, uses less power and features twice the amount of SATA-connectors.

On the other hand, eVGA beats many Nforce 780i boards around and since we know that almost no one uses Tri-SLI, eVGA at significantly lower price is probably a much better choice.

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Last modified on 26 May 2008
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