Board Revision: 2.0
BIOS Version: 4b10
IT journalists will have an easy time recalling the name of the EP-9NDA3+, because in Jargonese, NDA stands for "non-disclosure agreement", a contract that is often signed before technical briefings are held on future products.
In this case the N designates the chipset: the nForce3 Ultra with its AGP-8X port. For height considerations, however, EPoX unfortunately decided to put an active cooler on the chipset component.
The EPoX board stands out thanks to its characteristic green hue, easy-to-read model description, and Port-80 debug system, the display of which is found on the rear of the board on the left. It displays the current system condition as hex codes while the computer is booting, making debugging easier if anything should go wrong.
EPoX has equipped its board with a Gigabit network chip and additional FireWire controller, but did not include an extra mass storage controller. Unfortunately the EPoX board lags behind a bit in the benchmarks, as activating the 1T timing in the BIOS causes a crash during Windows startup. For that reason we had to use 2T for the test, which readily explains the slightly reduced performance. A forthcoming BIOS update should soon remedy this problem, however.






- Introduction
- Why Athlon 64?
- Abit AV8-3rd Eye
- Abit µGuruClock
- Albatron K8X890 Pro
- Asus A8V Deluxe
- Asus A8V Deluxe, Continued
- Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe
- Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe, Continued
- EPoX EP-9NDA3+
- EPoX EP-9NDA3+, Continued
- Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-9 - nForce4 And 1394b
- Gigabyte K8NSNXP-939 - nForce3 And 1394b
- WinFast 755FXK8AA
- MSI K8N Diamond - nForce4 SLI
- MSI K8N Neo2
- Soltek K8TPRO-939
- Soltek K8TPRO-939, Continued
- Test Setup
- OpenGL
- DirectX 8
- Synthetic
- Audio
- Video, Continued
- Video, Continued
- Conclusion
