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The layout of the 4G4A+ is a little different from the usual Pentium 4 boards you see but nothing massively out of the ordinary. As always, let's look at the layout starting at the top left and working our way from letf to righ and from top to bottom.
The very top left corner is dominated by the power circuitry to feed the socket with the socket enclosure itself the dominant feature on the top half of the board.
It employs a rotated socket arrangement but as we've seen on previous boards, since the area around the socket is cordoned off from the rest of the board by the heatsink cage, you don't fall into the trap you do on some Socket A or Socket 370 based boards where there isn't a lot of room around the socket to fit larger heatsinks.
So the EPoX passes the regular heatsink test by merits of employing the standard spec cage and it also passes the Swiftech/Alpha test that don't use the cage but still require a decent area around the socket for fitment, something the cage provides.
Moving past the heatsink area to the right we immediately hit the 3 DIMM slots (with specced PCB space for a fourth) and the blue coloured southbridge provided IDE ports aligned vertically.
The northbridge is passively cooled by a rather swanky heatsink held in place by the now standard issue Z-clip and to the left of the bridge and sink is the only power connector on the motherboard, a standard ATX connector as expected. EPoX don't employ any of the other power connectors commonly in use on recent Pentium 4 boards to provide extra power to the processor and other circuitry. This doesn't seem to affect stability in any way.
From the AGP slot down, the board is standard with 6 PCI and a lonely CNR slot (does anyone use these bar a select group of OEM's?). RAID duties are performed by a Highpoint HPT372 which provides 2 channels for supporting 4 devices via 2 provided ports.
Finally, we can see the POST monitor in the form of a 2 digit hexadecimal LED display for diagnosing boot issues and problems. Every manufacturer does this differently and I prefer the MSI method of a 4 dual colour LED arrangement but at least EPoX are thoughtful enough to include such a feature.
The last thing to note is the boards jet black PCB colour. It certainly makes the board stand out and given an aluminium backdrop, it seems to suit such a case better than a red or green coloured PCB.
In terms of layout, standard bar the rotated socket and while it's a 9-hole ATX mount it will fit in all but the smallest of ATX cases.
BIOS, Bundle and Manual are up next.
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