Final thoughts, HEXUS.awards & HEXUS.right2reply
Thinking of S939 in particular, NVIDIA's nForce4 SLI chipset is a pretty good base on which to build a performance PC on. There's a decent array of feature integration, huge 3D potential availed through SLI, and, if the boards that have passed through HEXUS are indicative of retail models, overclocking to 300MHz HTT is achievable more often than not.EPoX, with its EP-9NPA+ SLI, has taken onboard the chipset's attributes and added in discrete SATA (PCI-Express, which is nice) and FireWire400. What's also appealing is the voltage manipulation available in BIOS. Enthusiasts will be happy to see 3v+ DDR and up to 1.85v available for the CPU. The chipset, BIOS, and features implementation combine to make the 9NPA+ SLI a reasonably attractive proposition. Priced at around £105, the 9NPA+ SLI matches other manufacturers' similarly priced efforts in both features and performance, making it worthy of consideration if you want a fast, stable board that should overclock to 300MHz HTT and beyond.
I'd like to see EPoX revise the layout somewhat, perhaps by moving power ports to one side of the board, and, as mentioned above, a newer iteration of BIOSes that match the competitors'. Other than that, it's a pretty solid offering from EPoX. It's just about good enough to be put on your S939 SLI shortlist.
HEXUS Awards
HEXUS Right2Reply
EPoX provided us with the following response to our review.
We at EPoX Europe Computer BV would like to thank HEXUS.net for their thorough although concise product review of our EPoX EP-9NPA+ SLI. We are please to see that although the sample reviewed was an early pre-release board (from CeBit), it performed every task as well as the competition and is a credit to our Research & Development Team’s efforts and continued hardwork on all things SLI and related to SLI. You can be sure that you will see a whole plethora of mainboards based upon various chipsets with the ability to run more than one graphics card in conjunction with another for increased 3D processing power – there will be some very interesting products indeed!
We take on board your critique with regard to the power connector placement for the ATX12, and would like to add that its close proximity to the phases for the CPU do mean the cleanest of 12V current gets delivered to the CPU. With regard to the BIOS, we are evolving EPoX BIOS continually, and supporting tools within the operating system are taking on a whole new look – these innovations will also work with existing mainboard products.
We would like to add on a side note also that the Driver CD included is also a boot CD with the ability to make RAID floppies or to boot to a command prompt under FREEDOS – an excellent tool for making preparatory work on storage systems prior to operating system installation.
Andrew Cotterill
UK Business Manager
EPoX Europe Computer BV
