SUMMARY: Mike takes a close look at the EPoX 9NDA3+ Socket 939 motherboard today which is based around nVidia's nForce3 Ultra chipset. The motherboard makes use of an AGP port instead of the newer PCI-Express version which makes it a good option for users wanting to keep their old yet workable AGP graphics card and upgrade to the new Socket 939 Athlon 64 platform. Read on as we compare the EPoX 9NDA3+ against other solutions in its league and work out which is best for your needs as a gamer.
Yeah, yeah, I know... this is the dry part but we simply have to have an overall spec sheet to show what the feature set of this particular motherboard looks like. It doesn’t do us a bit of good to talk about a mainboard without knowing up front what it is supposed to be capable of. So sit back just a moment and I’ll make this as painless as possible.
For those with a keen eye, you’ll notice that this is nothing more than a copy/paste from the EPoX website. This is just a features list so I’ll let their PR guys take the credit for this.
CPU Socket: Support Socket-939 based AMD Athlon-64/ Athlon-64 FX up to 3600+ with 2.0GTs Hyper Transport
System Memory: Four 184-pin DDR SDRAM DIMM sockets Support single-sided or double-sided 2.5v DDR-333/400 DIMMs with dual channel architecture in 128/256/512Mb technologies Support Asynchronous clocking mode between FSB and DIMM Support up to 4GB system memory
Chipset: nVidia nForce3 Ultra AGPset
Expansion Slots: Five PCI connectors compliant with PCI v2.2 One 1.5v AGP- 8X/4X connector compliant with AGP v3.0
USB: Eight USB connectors compliant with USB2.0 from embedded USB controller (4 connectors at rear panel)
PATA IDE: Two IDE ports (up to 4 IDE devices) with UDMA-33, ATA-66/100/133 support from embedded IDE controller
SATA RAID: Two SATA ports from nForce3 Ultra with up to 150MBps bandwidth Two SATA ports from Marvell 88SR3020 SATA PHY RAID 0,1,0+1,JBOD support
LAN: 1Gb Ethernet from onboard Cicada CIS8201 Gigabit Ethernet PHY
1394a: Two 1394 ports with up to 400Mbps bandwidth from onboard VIA VT6307 1394 controller
Audio: Selectable 2, 6 or 8-CH audio from onboard Realtek ALC85x AC’97 v2.3 compliant CODEC Support Aux-In, CD-In, S/PDIF-in and S/PDIF-out Rear panel audio jacks configuration; For 2-channel mode; stereo Line-out (green), stereo Line-In (blue) and Mic-In (pink) For 6-channel mode; Front stereo-out(green), Rear stereo-out (blue), Center and Sub-woofer (pink) For 8-channel mode; stereo Line-In (blue), Mic-In (pink), Front stereo-out(green), Rear stereo-out (black), Center and Sub-woofer (Orange) and Side stereo-out(gray) Support Front panel audio for Mic-In and stereo Line-out only. (Front panel Line-out electrically shared with rear panel Line-out) Support Auto Jack Sensing for fool-proof audio device installation Support SPDIF Coaxial output Support SPDIF Optical output
I/O: Onboard Winbond W83627THF LPC I/O controller Legacy peripheral interface for PS/2 keyboard & mouse, FDD, Parallel, Two Serial, Game and IrDA (v1.0 compliant) Support Hardware Monitoring function such as fan speed monitoring and CPU temperature sensing Support Smart FAN Control and Intelligent Fan speed control for chassis Fan
BIOS: 4Mb Flash EEPROM with Award Plug & Play BIOS Support ACPI S3 (Suspend To RAM) mode in ACPI compliant O/S Support EZ Boot for fast bootable device selection Support Magic Health for system hardware status report during system boot-up Support Cool ‘N Quiet
Special Features: Support KBPO (Keyboard Power ON) function Support Wake-On-LAN by PME Support USB resume in S3 Onboard Post-Port LED display Support AGP-Master for protection against improper AGP card insertion
PowerBIOSfor excellent over clocking features: Support Asynchronous FSB/DIMM timing mode and 1MHz fine tuning on AGP clock Support BIOS adjustable CPU clock and voltage, AGP voltage, DIMM frequency and voltage settings
Powerful utilities for Windows: USDM (Unified System Diagnostic Manager) for system hardware monitoring Magic Flash for BIOS update without requiring DOS flash utility and bootable diskette Magic Screen for personal bootup screen design
Useful software bundle: Symantec Ghost, Norton Personal Firewall and Trend PC-Cillin for system backup and security
Form Factor: 305mm x 245mm x 40mm, ATX Size
Accessories: User’s manual, IO shield CD for drivers, utilities and bundle software Round IDE & FDD cables SATA data and power cable Game + COM Bracket cable
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