![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Wednesday, May 07, 2008
- Author:
- Daniel Dobrowolski
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
EVGA 750i SLI FTW
This budget SLI motherboard provides high end performance and deep features for a much smaller cost. As EVGA puts it, the 750i SLI FTW is engineered For The Win. Now let’s get to is and see what For The Win is all about.
BIOS
The BIOS for the 750i SLI FTW looks very much like reference design motherboard BIOS. The board does use the familiar Award BIOS design but it is quite different from the layout found in the reference boards. Version E175 was used for testing.
As you can see below the familiar Phoenix Award BIOS looks basically the same as it does on any other board that uses it. The BIOS is organized by category and each category contains menus and additional sub-menus beyond that for configuring various options.
The Standard CMOS Features menu contains the time and date settings, drive configuration settings, and halt settings. At the bottom is information on the system’s installed memory. Advanced BIOS features contain several sub menus as well as other options. Here you will find the CPU Feature menu, Hard Disk Boot Priority, and CD-ROM Boot Priority settings. The CPU Feature Menu contains Thermal Management, Speedstep, C1E, and virtualization settings. Also found here are settings for enabling or disabling individual CPU cores. The Advanced Chipset Features menu contains Spread Spectrum settings and the System BIOS Cacheable setting. Under Spread Spectrum Control you’ll find CPU Spread Spectrum, SATA Spread Spectrum and LDT Spread Spectrum settings.
Integrated Peripherals contains IDE Function, RAID configuration, and onboard hardware settings. You can enable or disable integrated hardware here. Power Management contains the standard ACPI settings, Power Management settings, HPET support, and power button control settings.
PnP/PCI Configurations contains settings such as Init Display First, Reset Configuration Data, and Resources control settings. PC Health shows CPU and motherboard temperature settings in Celsius and Fahrenheit along with voltages and fan speeds. Dynamic Fan Control is here as well. This is a submenu that takes you to an additional screen where you can make adjustments to fan speed settings.
Frequency Voltage Control is where all the overclocking and performance settings are found. In this menu you will find System Clocks, FSB & Memory Config, and System voltages which all lead to additional submenus. System Clocks doesn’t really contain any settings but rather just shows you the current settings of the CPU Frequency and FSB Clock. It shows you the current setting and the current value of each of those afore mentioned items. FSB & Memory Config has FSB Memory Clock mode settings, FSB settings and memory clock speed settings. Here there is also the Memory Timing Settings Submenu. That menu contains all your CAS latency settings and other related memory settings. What’s great about how EVGA has done this menu is that to the right the current value is displayed. So the first time you go into this menu to change settings once on Expert Mode you can see what your SPD settings are on the left. Its’ nice to have that as a reference point for tuning.
Essentially the BIOS is only slightly modified from the reference board version. Instead of everything being contained in the Advanced settings, Frequency, and Voltage Control settings are separated from other menus. This is a nice change as it makes working with those a bit easier.