EPoX EP-9U1697-GLi Motherboard Review - Installation and Utilities
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Installing the board was a piece of cake.
After installing it in the removable tray of my XG Dragon case, the motherboard was in, and the computer was operational. It’s almost time to start it up. But first let’s take a look at two very cool utilities that EPoX included with the board, Ghost Bios and Thunder Probe.
Ghost Bios is a utility designed to allow the easy backup and restore of your systems BIOS, in the case of some sort of power loss or other BIOS-corrupting event. When the BIOS of your machine is corrupted for any reason, the following screen will appear when you boot up.
At this point, if you have a floppy drive and a saved copy of your bios, you can hit “1” and restore your bios from your last save.
If you have neither of the above, you can insert your motherboard driver CD into your optical drive. It will then flash the bios with a temporary SAFEMODE BIOS file. Once you boot into windows, you can then use EPoX’s Magic Flash utility to update to the newest version of the bios from the internet.
This is actually great news, since in the past if your bios became corrupted, it could only be fixed by sending the motherboard back to the manufacturer for repair. Now you just need the drivers CD, and you can be back up and running in no time.
Thunder Probe is a hardware diagnostic program by EPoX, which gives users an in-depth look at a systems health through a fancy GUI interface. This utility allows the monitoring and recording of various temperatures, voltages, and speeds of a variety of components in your system. It also includes a control feature, called Smart Fan, to help regulate the cooling of your system. No monitoring utility would be complete without alarm thresholds to notify you if any of the measured metrics deviate from what you would consider to be acceptable.
Here are a couple pics of Thunder Probe in action:
Next: Taking a look in the BIOS >>
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