Closer Look

nForce4 Ultra is a highly-integrated chipset; its abilities are really extensive, although it is a single chip solution. A mainboard based on this chipset can easily do without any additional controllers. In fact, the only function the nForce4 Ultra lacks is FireWire. That’s why a FireWire controller is the only additional controller (except physical-layer chips) on board of EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra. The rest of the mainboard capabilities are determined by the chipset it is based on.

EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra is equipped with Socket 939 and supports 1GHz HyperTransport. Although rumors were circling around the Web that nForce had problems clocking HyperTransport at 1GHz, we had no problems during our tests of the EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra. Thus, this mainboard ideally suits for new Socket 939 Athlon 64 processors, manufactured with both 130nm and 90nm production technologies.

The four DIMM slots available on the mainboard are ready to take in modules of DDR400 SDRAM. The single-channel as well as dual-channel memory access mode is supported. The slots are color-coded for the dual-channel mode (unlike many other mainboards, the paired DIMM slots are placed near each other).

The graphics card should be installed into the single PCI Express x16 slot, while three PCI and three PCI Express x1 slots will accommodate your expansion cards (this also means this mainboard doesn’t support the SLI mode).

Since NVIDIA refused to implement its own SoundStorm audio-processor in its chipsets, the majority of mainboards on NVIDIA’s chipsets come with AC’97 sound. EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra is not an exception; this mainboard carries an eight-channel Realtek ALC850 codec. The codec complies with the AC’97 version 2.3 specification and supports the Universal Audio Jack technology (reassignment of the audio connectors depending on the devices attached). The six audio jacks and optical and coaxial SPDIF outputs are all located on the mainboard back panel.

NVIDIA supports the audio codec with a driver from NVIDIA itself, which includes the nvMixer utility for configuring the audio subsystem.

As far as the sound quality provided by this mainboard is concerned, here are the results obtained:

As you see, the sound of the EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra is rather average, but this is probably the mainboard manufacturer’s rather than NVIDIA’s fault. We will check this out in our future reviews of nForce4-based mainboards.