EVGA 790i SLI FTW Digital PWM Motherboard Review

790i FTW Digital BIOS Images

This is the main BIOS menu which has all your standard AWARD BIOS menus with a specialized Frequency/Voltage Control sub-menu for overclocking.

Here you can view the available hard drives, floppy drive, and set the system date and time.

Here you can select the boot device and specify which hard drive to boot from. I find disabling the full screen logo to be very useful so you can double-check the CPU and memory settings during boot.

Here you can adjust all the integrated peripherals. While benching I disabled all these features. For normal usage, though, it’s best to leave most enabled.

Here you can adjust the power button along with the available sleep states. You can also have the system power itself on at a specific time which could be a nice thing if you wake up at a regular time every day.

Here you can adjust which slot to use for the video output along with tweak the PCI slots.

The EVGA 790i FTW Digital reads quite accurately with its temperature sensors and voltage sensors. The -21C is indeed correct; these images were taken while I was pulling the system down for the LN2 test.

This is the most important menu in this BIOS to me. Here you can tweak all the CPU and memory settings while also adjusting the PCIe and HT lanes.

This menu lets you adjust the CPU multiplier and the PCIe/HT frequencies. I had sporadic issues with my E8600 reverting to the 10x multiplier but was told this will be hammered out in the next BIOS.

Here you can adjust the FSB, memory dividers, and memory timings. 790i permits you to unlink the memory from the FSB and adjust both separately using a slew of fine dividers. You will achieve the best performance, though, with the memory synched to the FSB and with the P1 and P2 settings enabled. However, enabling P1 and P2 will impact your maximum FSB.

This sub-menu has all the memory timings available on the 790i chipset. 790i easily supports 1T command rates and clocks CAS7 and CAS8 incredibly well. CAS6 and CAS5 aren’t its forte and should be utilized only in the direst of situations.

Here you can adjust the CPU settings such as EIST and turn off various cores.

These are the minimum voltage options available. I wouldn’t mind seeing lower SPP voltages but everything else is sufficient for some underclocking/undervolting.

There’s enough voltage available for the average consumer to burn out every component plugged into this board. For LN2 it would be nice to have 2.1v to 2.2v available to the CPU and slightly higher SPP voltages but otherwise everything is here that you could use. Tweaking GTLVREF voltages can help unlock a lot of FSB potential in this board.