[McG]

Anandtech je recenziral ovu (po meni) odličnu EPoX-ovu ploču, baziranu na ULi-evom 1697 chipsetu, koja po performansama drži korak (a u nekim slučajevima) i nadjačava bolje/skuplje ploče mnogo renomiranijih prozvođača.

Evo par dojmova Anandtech-ovih recenzenata:

The EPoX EP-9U1697 GLi offers excellent performance at a bargain price. The performance of the board in the majority of the benchmarks was extremely competitive with the ATI and NVIDIA chipset offerings. The stability of the board was superb at stock settings and very good at overclocked settings. We find it refreshing that a board with this performance is being offered for a retail price around US $85. While the ASRock 939SLI32-eSATA2 offers a greater feature set for the same price, the EPoX board offers significantly better performance in the overclocking area.

The board utilizes a manual jumper system to switch from single x16 PCI-E operation to dual x8 PCI-E operation. The performance of the board under SLI testing matched that of our nForce4 boards and offered full SLI compatibility with the ULi PowerExpress Engine Enabling driver. The board also fully supported our ATI X1900XTX and EVGA 7900GTX video cards.

The board offers RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 5 capability, NCQ, Hot Plug, and 3Gb/s support along with dual channel ATA133 Ultra DMA capability. The board also offers eight ULi USB 2.0 ports when utilizing the two USB 2.0 headers. The performances of the ULi SATA and IDE controllers were excellent and easily exceeded the nForce4 solutions.

The stability of the board was excellent during testing and general usage. The board's performance was consistently competitive with other ATI, ULi, and NVIDIA chipset offerings in the majority of benchmarks and applications.

Naravno nitko nije savršen:

However, we feel that EPoX made the following errors in the design and execution of the board. The location of the floppy drive connector at the bottom of the board, the location of the 24-pin ATX power connector right above the CPU socket, and the use of active cooling on the ULi M1697 chipset could be improved. EPoX will be offering the 9U1697 GLi-J board with PCI-E Gigabit via the Marvell 88E8053 controller, but it will only be upgrading the audio to the 8-channel capable ALC-850 AC97 codec.

The BIOS issue that we encountered, which caused random lockups after exiting Windows XP, was disconcerting, although we did not notice any stability or performance issues within Windows or during testing. EPoX has provided us with an updated BIOS for testing.

Kad stigne u prodaju, ploča bi trebala koštati oko 85$ (cca 500 kn) i manje (ovisno od dućanu, tj. retaileru).


Review