BIOS

EVGA hasn’t skimped on the nForce 750i SLI FTW’s BIOS either. If you’re familiar with EVGA’s nForce 680i SLI, 780i SLI, or 790i Ultra SLI moterboards, you’ll feel right at home with the nForce 750i SLI FTW’s BIOS interface as it’s basically the same. Those of you with dual or quad-core processors can turn on or off your CPUs processing cores: this is a feature NVIDIA first integrated into the nForce 680i SLI chipset. Like previous nForce chipsets, you can also run the FSB and memory bus at different speeds. Simply type in the clock speed you desire for the FSB and DDR2 speeds.

The other really neat feature that the nForce 750i SLI FTW BIOS supports is automatic recovery. Say for instance you are overclocking your CPU and you dial in speeds that are too high and your system won’t POST (no video signal). The nForce 750i SLI FTW board can detect when the motherboard doesn’t POST successfully and after a few seconds will automatically reboot the motherboard with safe mode settings.

As you can imagine, this feature really comes in handy when you’re overclocking your processor. Rather than having to manually clear CMOS after an unsuccessful overclocking attempt, the motherboard can often resolve the problem itself thanks to this recovery feature, and when recovery does fail and the motherboard just won’t boot, all the end user has to do is press the clear CMOS button on the PCB of the motherboard and the BIOS is reset. How’s that for convenience?

But it doesn’t stop there. With the nForce 7-series chipsets, NVIDIA has really fine-tuned system voltages in BIOS. The “Auto” voltage setting can be used reliably to adjust system voltages when overclocking. In fact, NVIDIA recommends that overclockers use the auto setting first when OC’ing, as the BIOS will automatically adjust voltages based on need rather than running at a predetermined, fixed level that may be higher than what’s actually needed.

This applies to all the system components, including the CPU and RAM voltages, as well as other components on the motherboard such as the nForce 200 chip, SPP, and FSB voltage.


If you do wish to tweak the voltages manually, the nForce 750i SLI FTW board is equipped with a wide range of options. CPU voltages up to 1.8V are available in 0.0125V increments, while FSB voltages range from 1.2-1.55V in 0.05V increments. DRAM voltage options range from 1.8-2.5V in 0.025V increments, while nForce SPP and nForce 200 voltages are available in 0.05V increments up to 1.55V.

All voltage settings are color-coded. Higher voltage options are colored red, while more moderate voltages are colored yellow.


Bus speed options are also pretty robust, with FSB speeds of 400-2500MHz available in 1MHz increments. Memory speeds of up to 1400MHz are also available in 1MHz increments within BIOS. You can also save and load up to 3 custom profiles for system voltage and timing settings, while dynamic fan control settings are also available.

Overclocking

We managed to hit a maximum FSB speed of 500MHz with our Core 2 Duo E6750 engineering sample CPU. We were actually able to boot even higher speeds in Vista, but the system wasn’t 100% stable.

While this may not sound like a lot at first, 500MHz is actually 5MHz higher than the max speed we achieved with this CPU when paired with ASUS’ P5K3 Deluxe Bearlake motherboard, so we were pretty pleased with our results. With a newer E6750 retail CPU we think even higher speeds could have been easily achieved (our E6750 CPU is over a year old, retail CPUs based on newer steppings have proven to OC very well).