DriverHeaven.net: Epox 9NPA+

Many consumers who want to build, upgrade or migrate to a socket 939 platform believe only nForce 4 SLI motherboards to be “high end” products, especially when it comes to overclocking. This is not entirely true as there are products which are designed to perform and overclock well without offering SLI, aiming at the middle range of the market. It is a fact that the majority of gamers prefer a good VGA card than two average VGA cards anyway. We will take a thorough look at such a motherboard today, designed and built by Epox, the 9NPA+ Ultra.

The Epox 9NPA+ Ultra is based on the nForce 4 Ultra chipset which offers good performance and as many features as SLI based motherboards but with the obvious limitation of only being able to take a single PCI-E video card. Other than that, it can support the Athlon X2 CPU series, SATA-II drives and 4GB worth of RAM, among many other features. Let us have a look at the manufacturer specifications:

CPU Socket	• Support Socket-939 based AMD Athlon-64 / Athlon-64 FX / Athlon 64 X2 up to 4800+ with 2.0GT/s Hyper Transport
Chipset	• nVidia nForce4 Ultra PCIe set
Memory	• 4x 184-pin DDR SDRAM DIMM sockets • Supports single- / doublesided 2.5v DDR-266/333/400 DIMMs in 64/128/256/512/1024 MB Modules • Supports up to 4 GB System Memory • Dual Channel Architecture
Expansion Slots	• 3x PCI Express (x1) connectors compliant with PCI Express 1.0 • 1x PCI Express (x16) connector compliant with PCI Express 1.0 • 3x PCI connectors PCI v2.3
Onboard PCI/IDE	• Two IDE ports (up to 4 IDE devices) with UDMA-33, ATA-66/100/133 support from embedded IDE controller.
I/O	• Onboard Winbond W83627THF LPC bus I/O controller • Legacy peripheral interface for PS/2 keyboard & mouse, FDD, Parallel, Two Serial, Game and IrDA (version 1.0 compliant) • 1394A: Two ports (400 Mbps) • Smartfan™ function for noise / temperature control of CPU cooler automatically based upon temperature
USB	• Ten USB connectors compliant with USB2.0 from embedded USB controller (4 connectors at rear panel)
S-ATA	• Four S-ATA2 ports from nForce CK8-04 up to 300MBps bandwidth (and NCQ) with RAID 0,1 0+1, JBOD support
Integrated Audio	• Selectable 2, 6 or 8-CH audio from onboard Realtek ALC850 AC'97 version 2.3 compliant CODEC width 18-bit ADC and 16-bit DAC resolution • Support AUX-in, CD-in, S/PDIF-in and S/PDIF-out • Rear Panel audio jacks configuration: - For 2-channel mode; stereo Line-out (Lime), stereo Line-In (Light blue) and Mic-In (Pink) - For 6-channel mode; Front stereo-out (Lime), Rear stereo-out (Light blue), Center and Sub-woofer (Pink) - For 8-channel mode; stereo Line-In (Light blue), Mic-In (Pink), Front Stereo-out (Lime), 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 • Coaxial S/PDIF-out available on rear panel
LAN	• 1Gb Ethernet from onboard Cicada CIS8201 Gigabit Ethernet PHY • Embedded Nvidia Firewall with Active Armor (SNE)
BIOS	• 4MB Flash EEPROM with Award Plug&Play BIOS • Support EZ Boot for fast bootable device selection • Support Magic Health for system hardware status report during system boot-up • Award Plug&Play BIOS
Special Features	• Onboard Post-Port LED display • KBPO (Keyboard Power On) • Wake-On-LAN • Supports USB resume in S3 • Support CPU over heat protection
Power BIOS	• Support Asynchronous clocking mode between FSB and AGP/PCI • BIOS adjustable CPU clock and voltage, DIMM frequency and voltage settings.
Powerful utilities for Windows	• ThunderProbe - a GUI based hardware diagnostic suite for the monitoring of voltages, temperatures and fan speed rates aswell as Smartfan control functionality. • Magic Flash for BIOS update without requiring a DOS Flash utility and/or bootable diskettes • Magic Screen for personal bootup screen design
Useful Software Bundle	• Symantec Norton Anti Virus system security • Wasay Pro Magic for system backup
Form Factor	• 305mm x 245mm x 40mm, ATX Size

The specifications are quite impressive for a motherboard in this price range, on first look it appears to have all bases covered. The connectivity can be considered above average when taking into account the needs of the common home user, as the motherboard offers 10 USB ports and 2 Firewire ports to connect your peripherals at, without taking into account the legacy serial and parallel ports at all.

Internally, it can support up to 4 SATA-II hard disk drives and 4 IDE devices. The card slots are balanced as the 9NPA+ offers 3 PCI-E 1x slots and 3 PCI slots for your expansion cards. The onboard audio is based on the Realtek ALC850 8-channel chip, which is not bad at all but we would love to see the high-definition ALC880 chip at its place.