Introduction
EPoX EP-5LWA+ i925XE MainboardIntel's recent announcement of a range of multi-core Pentium CPUs and a couple of new, supporting chipsets has put a bit of a dampener on current i925XE boards, if you ask me. Why? Well, for one, Intel has made it quite clear that present 900-series boards will not support the new processors at all. Further, both the i955X Express and i945X will feature the new ICH7(R) southbridge, which offers beefed-up storage options and a couple of extra PCI-Express x1 lanes, should motherboard partners wish to implement them. On the northbridge side, Intel and its cohorts will, for the i955X Express at least, ship SLI-ready boards that take full advantage of the dual rendering power and near-double performance gained by running two GeForce 6xxx cards in tandem.
The good news for present i925XE chipset partners who are still extolling the virtues of this soon-to-be-topped core logic, is that retail i945X/i955XE boards won't be appearing in the marketplace for a short while yet. Whilst they're still paper talk, i925XE will remain the highest-performing and highest-featured Intel desktop chipset which you can buy right now. We've seen decent implementations of the i925XE logic from the likes of ASUS and Gigabyte. It's now EPoX's turn to go under the HEXUS spotlight, as we see if it has the right balance between features and price for it to be a winning solution.
