EPOX – EPoX 9NDA3+ nForce3 Ultra Motherboard Review

For AMD enthusiasts, nVIDIA’s nForce3 Ultra chipset is easily the most popular Socket 939 chipset. Performance-wise it’s about the same speed as the VIA K8T800 PRO, but the one thing in favor of the nForce3 Ultra is the presence of functioning AGP/PCI locks. Based on the nForce3 Ultra chipset, the Epox 9NDA3+ Socket 939 motherboard comes with onboard IEEE 1394a Firewire, Gigabit Ethernet, 8 USB2.0 jacks, an additional 2-channel SATA controller, a 7.1-channel audio and Epox’s awesome Port 80 diagnostics card. Two other extras on the board and in the bundle are MOSFET heatsinks and a handy slot/Philips screwdriver.

The Epox 9NDA3+ offers users five PCI slots, and one 8X AGP slot for expansion purposes. The four dual channel DDR sockets will support up to 4GB of DDR-266/333/400 RAM, in sizes of up to 512MB per DIMM. The processor socket supports 939-pin Athlon64 and AthlonFX CPUs, and maintains a 2GHz (1GHz upstream, 1GHz downstream) Hypertransport link with the nVidia nForce 3 Ultra chipset.

…The Epox 9NDA3+ is a great motherboard for typical multimedia users and performance enthusiasts interested in overclocking. Included in the $154 CDN ($129 US) price tag is a Gigabit NIC, IEEE 1394, a 7.1 onboard audio codec and an additional Serial ATA controller. It’s not the most well-equipped motherboard on the market, but it has pretty much everything essential. If you find you’re missing something, the five 32-bit PCI slots, and four DDR DIMM slots should be plenty for your expansion needs.

In the benchmarks we ran on the Epox 9NDA3+, the board demonstrated it was able to keep up with the MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum and MSI K8T Neo2-FIR motherboards. Both of these solutions are among the fastest on the market. Epox has always been good at overclocking and we’re certainly not disappointed with the results of the 9NDA3+. In our tests with an Athlon64 4000+ CPU, PCstats was able to achieve an FSB overclock of 283 MHz, which is higher than we’ve ever gone on any socket 939 motherboard previously. If you’re thinking about jumping on the Socket 939 bandwagon, the Epox 9NDA3+ is a fine choice. It’s pretty much as fast as any other Socket 939 motherboard on the market and it’s affordable… There’s not much more you could ask for.

Epox 9NDA3+ Motherboard Review @ PCStats