EVGA Z77 FTW Motherboard Review

Ivy Bridge brings with it some amazing performance that can only be realized by a skilled overclocker, those are some bold words for a "tock proc" but when paired with a good motherboard you can get well over 6Ghz with proper LN2 cooling.  Of course these days just about any motherboard will come with some level of overclocking either by changing the multiplier on K type chips or adjusting the BCLK.  The difference is in how well the motherboard supports this kind of activity.  That is the nice thing about EVGA motherboards, they have always been designed with the enthusiast in mind either to support flat out processor overclocking or multi gpu gaming configurations.  You can find it with EVGA.
 
In this review we are looking at the new EVGA Z77 FTW motherboard which is the current flagship using the LGA 1155 processor.  The Intel Z77 chipset brings with it better support for Ivy Bridge with native PCI Express 3.0 and DDR3 memory speeds in excess of 2133Mhz.  In-house overclockers and dedicated UEFI programmers have worked in conjunction to tweak and tune this motherboard for the best performance and in their words.  "This is the best motherboard we have built since X58". 

Let us see how they did.

The board layout has changed considerably since the Z68 FTW to feature a more aggressive PCI Express layout and better placement of onboard components.  This motherboard does come with a PCI Express switch chip to better support multi GPU configurations and happens to be one of the first Z77 motherboards that we have seen to support 4-way SLI and Crossfire video card configurations.