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EVGA P55 FTW Motherboard Review
Author: Will West
Published: Monday, November 23, 2009
Motherboard Cooling & ECP V2
12 power phase and 600w power support can generate some serious heat which explains the rather large heatsinks found over the MOSFETS around the CPU socket. These are stand alone heatsinks and will require localized cooling if you choose to watercool.
The Southbridge features a very modest passive heatsink with the EVGA logo prominently displayed. The P55 chipset naturally runs very cool at normal speeds so there is really no need for additional cooling or fancy heatpipes.
In traditional motherboards the Northbridge chip is located directly below the CPU and above the first expansion slot. Due to the architecture of the 1156 processor the P55 only requires a single chip which is located in the traditional Southbridge location. So what do you do with all of the extra space?
EVGA has included an awesome heartbeat pulse that is just downright cool to see in action. As load increases the E will begin to flash faster and faster giving some animated life to your system. Also works great with any windowed case and easily completes the FTW attitude of the P55 FTW.
EVGA has included an awesome heartbeat pulse that is just downright cool to see in action. As load increases the E will begin to flash faster and faster giving some animated life to your system. Also works great with any windowed case and easily completes the FTW attitude of the P55 FTW.
ECP V2
The EVGA P55 FTW comes with an great external control panel they call ECP, or EVGA Control Panel. This little card comes with a variety of features that you would normally find on the motherboard like Power/Reset and CMOS clear but also allows you to do micro voltage adjustments independent of the BIOS settings.
Sadly the control panel does not come with a mounting tray or cover plate for the buttons and Debug LED but a creative modder could fashion something about a drive bay cover without too much difficultly.
