EVGA 790i SLI FTW Digital PWM Motherboard Review

Liquid Nitrogen + GTX280 Results

You had to see this coming. I was able to borrow two EVGA GTX 280 video cards and do some LN2 overclocking. I had issues getting 540+FSB stable so I opted for the easier solution and pulled out the QX9650 and the F1EE LN2 pot. Insulating the EVGA 790i FTW Digital was an incredibly easy process and within 10 minutes I was up and running.

It was funny how easy 5400MHz (433FSB x 12.5) was to achieve with this board. What this screenshot doesn’t show though was the ~8 hours of struggling it took to get 3D06 to complete. Strangely enough it wasn’t CPU trouble but memory and GPU trouble. I originally tried benching with the memory at 1950MHz 7-6-5-15-1T with P1/P2 enabled and that worked for 3D01, 3D03, and 3D05 but would fail all the time in 3D06. So I dropped the memory down to 6-6-6-18-1T with P1/P2 enabled and 1400MHz.

Then with the GPUs even at 675MHz core and 1200MHz memory they would artifact and the driver would crash each time after Game Test 2 in 3D06 and only in 3D06. In the end, 28020 3DMarks was the highest I was able to achieve, incredibly inefficient and I’m not too proud of it. I settled for 433FSB as I couldn’t get anything between 436FSB and 452FSB to work. I could, however, sometimes get somewhere between 453FSB and 462FSB to work. It’s safe to say this board is quirky and not predictable.