EPoX EP-9U1697-GLi Motherboard Review - Inside the box
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When I opened the box for the first time, I had mixed feelings. This board supports all the high quality Athlon 64 processors (including the AMD 64 3700+ I have) and SLI mode for two PCI-Express cards. While those are cool, I found the huge jumpers to configure your PCI Express settings not so cool. I also thought the 24pin power socket was in an awkward position as well.
Inside the box with the motherboard was a driver CD, a card-slot USB extender for two additional USB ports, an I/O panel backplate, a couple of SATA cables, an IDE wire, and FDD wire, and a couple power adapters.
You will notice that I didn’t enclose a picture of the drivers CD. Since we got this board before it was officially released, the drivers came on a plain CDR. As it stand now, this board is set to be released some time around the end of April 2006.
Ok, now take a closer look at the board.
For starters, here’s the good old socket 939. It’s positioned in the usual place along the top of the board (if you were looking at the board mounted vertically). The black frame around it is quite sturdy, and allows for a large heatsink or CPU cooler to be utilized. Notice the placement of the 24 pin (and the 12v) connector at the bottom right of the picture. This is a kind of odd placement, since it places the CPU basically right in the path between the PSU and the connector.
Moving on, here you can see the memory slots next to the CPU socket. These 184-pin SDRAM slots can support up to 4GB of RAM and are capable of dual-channel operation. They are appropriately color coded for dual channel, as well. They are rather close together, and using dual-channel mode requires putting two memory sticks right next to each other. Above the memory slots, you will also see IDE connector 1.
Moving to the right, we come to a busy area of the board. The ULi chipset itself is covered with a stylish fan and heatsink with the EPoX logo on it. Above it, you can see the 4 SATA II connectors, as well as the second IDE connector. To the right of the IDE connector, you see the black floppy connector (even though many machines don’t even have floppy drives, nowadays).
Between the IDE and floppy connectors are 3 nice features. First, there are two small buttons along the edge of the board. They are labeled “PW-ON” and “RESET.” These are basically on-board switches for turning the computer on/off and resetting it. Why is this important? If you’ve ever had a configuration problem with a component on your motherboard, or have tried to troubleshoot some internal piece not working correctly, these buttons are actually quite useful. Below the two buttons is another slice of nice troubleshooting pie, the CP80P is an LED readout that indicates the trouble area of the board, if it fails to boot properly. This is an invaluable tool, as it points you directly to problem areas without the need to troubleshoot each piece of the system.
Finally, along the right, are front panel connectors, as well as two USB headers below them. Each header supports 2 ports. There is an extra USB slot cover that came with the motherboard, which allows 2 more ports on the back panel (along with the 4 that are already there).
Here’s a shot of I/O ports. You can see the integrated LAN, USB, Serial and Parallel ports, PS/2 keyboard and mouse, audio and spdif ports. This is all pretty standard when it comes to today’s boards.
And this brings us back around, full circle. I saved this for last because this is one of the small things I didn’t like about the board. Here are the two large PCI-e slots. In order to use one x16 PCI-e card, you would utilize the slot on the top. If you are using two video cards in an SLI configuration, you would use both of the large x16 slots. But to configure the board for SLI mode, you have to manually change all 32 of the yellow jumpers to the 2-3 positions. I mean, it’s not complicated, just seems it could have been engineered to be a little simpler.
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