After much anticipation, the ULi M1697 chipset is now being accepted by overclocking manufacturers like EPoX. EPoX EP-9U1697 bboard supports 2 IDE channels and 4 SATA II 3Gb/s RAID 0,1,0+1,5 ports. There are 8 USB ports (4 via rear panel).  There are two LAN ports, one Fast Ethernet and the other a GbE. 8 Channel Audio is also supported through ALC850. Most importantly, this is the one of the first boards to support 2 x 8 PCIe lanes for SLI compatible. NF4 SLI chipset is no longer the only chipset which supports SLI mode. The board also has Ghost BIOS feature which allows corrupted BIOS to be recovered easily. This can be accomplished by inserting the provided CDROM and pressing a key. Everything will be back to normal again. One thing that i notice is that the P80P debug led will show the real time CPU temperature which is definitely a good feature. The CPU Fan can also be configured to speed up/down depending on temperatures, this greatly reduce the noise level of the system.

EPoX has the tradition of making overclockable boards. Below are some of the voltage adjustments you can make with this board.

Chipset voltage adjust Yes, 2V +0.1V - +0.2V
DDR voltage adjust Yes, 2.5V – 3.2V
CPU Vcore Yes, 0.8V – 1.75V
HT bus voltage Yes ; 1.2V~1.6V
Clock adjust : 200 ~ 500MHz, CPU Multiplier 5x~25x
PCI-E speed range 100MHz – 200MHz

In our tests to push for high CLK, we were able to achieve 6 x 390MHz on our FX-53 processor. Voltages used are Vcore-1.50v, Vdimm=2.75v, Vchipset=2.00v, ASync mem=DDR200, HT set to 400MHz.

Performance wise, the board seems to work very well in single card mode or SLI compatible mode. Although we see that benchmarks like 3Dmark03/05 seems to perform better than NF4 SLI board, it wouldn't take anyone to notice that Forceware drivers has the tradition to boost their performance numbers when paired with their own cards. When we used some actual games to test the performance levels. e.g FEAR or Riddick, we see that the performance level did not differ by a lot. For performance of USB and SATA II, you can refer to these USB & SATA II benchmarks of ULi M1697.

Installation is quite straightforward for this board. There are easy to use power on, reset switches and a debug led which also functions as a cpu temperature displa. To configure the board to SLI mode, simply jumper the groups of pins to 2-3 position. (1-2 is single card mode).

Overall, the board exhibits good overclockability and feature set that can compete head to head with the major players out there. The feature set is also pretty complete except for the lack of 1394.

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