Layout and features
EPoX have maintained their trademark dark green shade of PCB on the 8RDA+. Unlike the recently reviewed ABIT offering, the EPoX still carries the 4 mounting holes around the CPU socket, thereby allowing you to use larger coolers for more effective cooling; you'll probably need them with the voltage on offer. I like the positioning of the two fan headers just below the socket - they allow easy power sources for dual fan cooling solutions.
It seems as if style pervades every facet of our lives. The passive Northbridge is a case in point. I can appreciate the fact that it's passive, as most of us look for quieter systems. The 3 DDR DIMM slots sit in their typical nForce2 positions. Incidentally, running memory in slots 1 and 3 works best. EPoX carry over their purple AGP slot colour from previous VIA-based motherboards. It's also nice to see the full complement of 6 PCI slots although with this number of integrated features you'll find it difficult to fill them all.
The positioning of the 3 DIMM slots almost precludes the placing of the standard IDE ports at the top of the board. Much like every other nForce2 currently available, the 8RDA+ houses them in a location more familiar for IDE RAID ports. There's no RAID facility on this particular model, although I'm sure a suitably equipped model will feature soon enough. The excellent EPoX debug LED makes its appearance here; excellent for simple troubleshooting. I also appreciate the placement of the various case connectors. They're laid out in intuitive fashion in a single line.
The NVIDIA MCP-T caters for LAN, Firewire, sound (fed through Realtek physical layers (PHYs)) and USB2.0. That's much like the ABIT version. Above you can see the two Firewire headers, a USB2.0 header, the third usable fan header, and one of the Realtek physical interfaces via the MCP-T.
You can use the 8RDA+ in 6-channel sound mode, as the blue jack doubles up as the rear speakers output an the pink jack provides centre / subwoofer support. Naturally, the green jack still services the front pair. Although there's an optional add-on card that provides optical out, this motherboard ships without the Soundstorm certification (You need to have S/PDIF as standard, as well as 6-channel support and hardware AC3 encoding. There's an additional SPD650 card that will give it the full range of sound options). It's nice to see 4 USB2.0 ports on the backplane of this particular model.
