Epox had quite a success in the AMD K7 (S462) period with their 8RDA+ board which offered excellent overclocking potential and held its own well next to Abit’s NF7-S Board here;

While the K8 enthusiasts motherboards were mainly dominated by DFI and Asus, with AMD’s new AM2 platform Epox is again aiming at taking the overclocking crown; We take a sneak peak at their upcoming SLI motherboard which features some excellent out of the box overclocking options.

Chipset: MCP55P SLI

CPU: AMD Socket AM2

Memory: 4 DDR slots supports up to 4Gb in Dual Channel mode. DDR2 533/667/800Mhz.

1x PCIe 16x / 1x PCIe 8x / 2x PCI 1x / 3x PCI

8x SATA II connectors / 2x PATA connectors – support for RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 5

10x USB 2.0 Ports

Two Gigabit Network Interfaces (Marvell 88E1116 chip)

Realtek ALC883 8-Channel onboard Audio



The board has its two full sizes PCIe slots widely spaced out, this does leave little room for the 3 PCI slots near the bottom.



Epox has added a power and reset button right on the mainboard, excellent for those enthusiasts who don’t bother installing their system inside a case. They’ve also added an addition JMB363 chip which handles the storage devices on the board, allowing for two IDE connectors and 8 SATA connectors.



One of the few shortcomings on the MF570 SLI is the spacing around the CPU socket, the memory slots are awfully close.



The power modulation uses Japanese aluminum shells which provides the CPU and other components on the board with rock stable power.



No more serial or parallel ports, if you still have an older printer, or have a device which requires a COM port, you are out of luck.



First boot on the new AM2 Platform with:

CPU:AMD AM2 Althon64 X2 4800+

DRAM: 2*風系列 DDRII 667 512MB

VGA:ELSA 6600GT

HD:Seagate 7200.7 80GB

POWER: AcBel 550W

After power up we’re greeted by a flashy boot screen:



Let’s take a closer look at the BIOS options ->

The Epox has a Phoenix AwardBIOS with some custom options added for us enthusiasts, the most interesting ones you’ll find under the “Power BIOS features”



The HTT (FSB) can be increased from 200 to 450 in 1 Mhz steps.



The multiplier can be lowered to 4x if your CPU supports it.



DDR2 Memory voltage control 1.8~1.5v, it would have been better if there were more steps between the extremes now the voltage is increase 0.1v per step, 0.05v would have been better.



AM2 officially supports speeds up to DDR2 800.



Under the “Advanced Chipset Features” menu you can have detailed control over the HT settings and Memory timings




DRAM configuration allows for very detailed control of the memory timings.



Health Status Page allows you to enable Smart Fan control for silent computing, and you can monitor temperatures and voltages. Interesting thing to notice is the “Thermo Stick Temperature” value, which corresponds to an external temp probe, much like the one once included in the now dated Abit TH7 motherboard.

Epox is bundling their own Monitoring software which works under the Windows OS, called Thunder Probe.



The software can monitor voltages, temperatures and memory frequency.

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The Epox board overclocked quite well, easily running stable at DDR2 800 speeds and beyond. Because of the AMD NDA which is still applicable until the 23rd May we can’t offer detailed benchmarks results for now; Here are a few numbers to give you an idea. (Sisoft Sandra 2007 was used , get your free copy here)





To wrap up this preview let’s quickly recap the good the bad and the ugly. Epox is using high quality components on this board which will bring excellent overclocking potential. You can hook up to 12 Hard Disk which is quite impressive. The BIOS offers a wide range of control over voltage and HTT speed as well as memory timings.

While the overall board layout is far from bad, there are a few areas which could be improved, the CPU socket is too close to the memory banks and the ATX power connector is located in area which might obstruct airflow when you can’t get that large ATX power cable hidden away well enough. First performance/overclocking tests are promising; obtaining high HTT speeds was possible, topping out slightly over 300Mhz.

With reborn Abit, DFI, Asus, MSI and many others aiming to get the best enthusiasts board out there, it will be the customers who’ll benefit in the end, getting more for less. Only 1 more week until AM2… the wait is almost over.


Questions/Comments: forum thread