It has been sometime since we saw a well built board that is features packed. Not only is the board feature packed, the package also included rounded cables and a screwdriver and small heatsinks that can be used on the mosfets.

When we first saw the EPoX 8KDA3+, we were surprised by the amount of SATA ports on board. In fact, we were surprised by the fact that it even supported RAID 5 which offers fault tolerance. In addition, the board offers 8 ch audio and digital out. The best is the integrated Gigabit Ethernet in chipset and also the possibility of mix and match pairs of SATA+PATA as a RAID array.

EPoX has definitely catered this board not only to the power hungry end users but also to the overclockers. The amount of tweakable options in the BIOS tells all. With voltage adjustments, you could easily tweak the system for the best stability when overclocking the board. PCI/AGP can also be fixed to 33/66MHz. Although FSB is limited to 250MHz, it is quite adequate for most. There is also a multiplier control which allows you to lower it so that you can achieve higher FSB during overclocking.

UPDATE : EPoX just provided a new BIOS that opens up the FSB range and now you can choose up to 350MHz. We retest the processor and managed to overclocked it up to 275MHz FSB x 8. Check out the overclocked results on page 8.

In our tests, we also noticed that the chipset heatsink is stuck to the chipset using a double sided thermal tape. This is definitely not good enough. If you have a chipset heatsink, do place a fan on top of it to cool the chipset.

Performance of this board is good. This is apparent in the results of the comanche 4 tests. In the other tests, it is on par with the other chipsets and we can clearly see how the NF3-250gb chipset has improved over its predecessor.

In our overclocking tests, we used our Corsair XMS3500C2 module running at CAS 2, 6-2-2 at MAXCLK=166. I then raise my FSB to 250MHz and multiplier to 9. The system POST and ran without a problem. Thus we are able to overclock our AXP 3200+ (2GHz) to 9 x 250 = 2250MHz.

Voltages Vdimm=2.7v, Vcpu=1.65v, VAGP=1.7v, Vchipset=1.7v

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Discuss & read more

Pros 好处:

• 8 Channel audio
• USB 2.0 
• SATA RAID 0/1/10/5
• SATA/PATA RAID
• Integrated Gigabit Ethernet
• Vdimm, Vagp, Vcore,Vchipset adjustments

Cons 坏处:

• No Firewire
• No fan on chipset heatsink
• 2 SATA ports near the AGP slot
• Heatsink of NF3-250gb chipset is HOT

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10 stars.

Product Excellence & Gold Award