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Epox EP-D3VA

What can I really say? The recent months have been great for the dual-processor lovers of the world. Word got out that VIA was planning to release a dual capable chipset which was cool for two reasons: 1. Intel no longer owned the high-end workstation/server market (competition is good for the consumer), and, 2. The VIA option would allow for the use of inexpensive SDRam instead of the overly pricey RDRam. Unfortunately, the first few motherboards to hit the market touting the SMP chipset from VIA were a bit disappointing. The memory bandwidth was bad, the compatibility wasn't all there, etc, etc...

Recently however, we have begun to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Every VIA based motherboard I have received has been better than the last. Without exception, the VIA based duallies are becoming a serious force in the marketplace. Enter Epox.

Epox has been around for a long time and they have been making quality dual processor motherboards for almost as long. While not as popular as some of the other big manufacturers, I had heard nothing but good things about the quality and stability of their boards. I eagerly anticipated the arrival of the new EP-D3VA from Epox but could it measure up? Let's see...

The Specs

The EP-D3VA is stocked full of everything we love and is missing some things we hate. I won't go into the full specs (which can be found on Epox's page), but there are a few things I'd like to highlight.

It certainly looks like they covered their bases for a serious workstation board. With features like IDE RAID and support for up to 1.5gb of memory, the specs are beginning to look mighty tasty. One other thing that I think is worthy of note is that there is no built-in sound on this board! WOOHOO! One less thing I have to disable in the BIOS :-)

The EP-D3VA ships with all the standard fare. For your hard earned money, you get a pair of ATA66/100 cables, a floppy cable, a manual, and a driver disk. I was a bit disappointed in the fact that they only included two ATA cables though. With the inclusion of the HighPoint RAID controller you would think that they would include at least three cables (two for the RAID and one for a CDRom/etc). Maybe I'm just being picky, but it is an observation.

The board is very well laid out. Ever since my first Tyan Tiger 2 (dual LX board), I have wondered why everyone didn't put the IDE connectors horizontally on the board instead of vertically. It makes for some easy (and neat) cable routing. I would also like to take this opportunity to applaud Epox for including an ISA slot! It seems that 5 PCI slots is all you get on any of the dual VIA based boards (so far), so I was quite happy to see an ISA slot instead of a AMR/CNR slot. At least you have the option to hang on to your hardware based ISA modem or 10baseT NIC (I still prefer to use one for my cable modem connection, I just hate wasting an expensive 3Com NIC for that :-)

This motherboard was a breeze to install. As I mentioned before, the cabling was easy to keep under control thanks to the horizontal orientation of (most of) the IDE connectors. The jumpers for the power switch, reset switch, et al are in plain sight. It doesn't get any easier really. I was also happy to note that this board had a bit more room surrounding the sockets, and the placement of the ATX power connector makes this motherboard compatible with about any heatsink you'd care to throw at it (Although I'm sure one of you cooling freaks will find one that doesn't fit).

Once I got the board up and running, I was happy to see that it had one thing that the MSI 694D did NOT have (and still doesn't)... Memory tweaks in the BIOS! Can I get an "Amen"! While I am sure that more memory bandwidth can be tweaked out of the board using WPCRSET, it is not absolutely necessary. All of the standard tweaks are available in the BIOS, including memory interleaving. Kudos to Epox for releasing the first dual VIA board with that feature.

Overclocking on the D3VA is a mixed bag. On one hand, Epox was kind enough to provide the end user with FSB adjustment via the BIOS, but there is no ability to manipulate the core voltage. With newer cB0 and cC0 stepping PIII's, this shouldn't be too much of a problem as most of these PIII's overclock with no increase in voltage (My 600E's run all day at 800 with default voltage). As far as FSB selection, the D3VA is loaded. I didn't count the total number of available bus speeds, but I can say that between 133mhz and 155mhz (the boards maximum FSB) there are ten settings. That figures out to be one every 2mhz give or take. Not too shabby... For the purposes of my benchmarking, everything was run at default speed. I will add though that I was able to run my 667's at 700+ completely stable on this board.