EPOX - EPoX 8KDA3+ nForce 3 250Gb Motherboard Review

The INQ has reviewed the EPoX 8KDA3+ (NVIDIA nForce3 250Gb) benchmarked against the Epox 8HDA3+ (VIA K8T800):

Epox has always made overclocker friendly motherboards and this is no exception. We had the opportunity to play with one of the first boards ever, very early revision but still completely functional and almost ready to go in the shops. At test time, we were notified that revision 0.3 will be ready very soon but it was too late for us to stop the current review. Revision 0.2 was surprisingly stable all the time and we didn’t have any problems with the board.

…Nvidia did a good job, it seems but Via’s job still seems to be better. I was expecting this chipset which arrived over six months later to be the clear winner. This simply was not the case. Via is still faster even though it’s marginal in some cases. Overclocking wise, the boards were the same, except that with the Nforce 3 250 Gb you should be able to set AGP and PCI speeds which should help in overclocking. Both motherboards are top class solutions so you won’t regret buying either, and Nvidia’s chipset has this firewall advantage.

I still don’t understand why Nforce 3 250 - even with 16bit uplink and 16 bit downlink doesn’t perform as well as the K8T800 does. The newer BIOS might change the situation but this is yet to be seen. All eyes were on the Nforce 3 250 that Nvidia promised in January, but in late April still the first boards are not on the shelves. This marks Nforce 3 250 as a May/June product. It seems that Nvidia needs the 939 CPU and its dual memory capabilities since this is where Nvidia excels.

The next fight is Nforce 3 250 Ultra versus VIA K8T800 PRO and fight goes to 1000 MHz arena or dual channel 939 CPUs. µ

The Inquirer
Epox 8KDA3+ Nforce 3 250Gb reviewed