EPOX - EPoX 8KDA3+ NVIDIA nForce3 250Gb Motherboard Review

Abbas has reviewed the new EPoX 8KDA3+ nForce3 250Gb motherboard over at t-break:

The 8KDA3+ is based on the higher-end nF3-250Gb chipset which brings on-chip Gigabit LAN support as well as Firewall capabilities along with the other standard options such as native SATA/RAID support, eight USB 2.0 ports and AGP 8X capability. For audio, Epox decides upon the ALC850 solution which provides a decent 8 channel output along with optical and SPDIF outputs. Epox also provides you with six PCI slots which is more than any other nF3-250 board we’ve looked at and is sure to please people with lots of expansion cards.

Although RAID is supported by nVidia’s chipset that allows a combination or Parallel and Serial-ATA drives to work together, Epox also adds a Silicon Image 3114 controller which provides four additional Serial-ATA ports. The best part about this controller is that it can create RAID 5 which the chipset’s RAID controller lacks.

…Epox does a good job with the 8KDA3+. Some of the minor complains we have is the lack of active cooling on the nForce3-250Gb and some overclocking options. Feature-wise, the board is very good offering RAID5 and eight channel audio. Performance level of this board is also on par with the rest of the high-end boards. With a little bit of tweaking and hopefully some BIOS updates, the 8KDA3+ could become a very fine motherboard.

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Epox 8KDA3+ Motherboard