PCB Design and Functionality

First of all let’s take a look at the CPU voltage regulator circuitry.

Among the advantages of this design I should list four-phase structure, use of high-quality capacitors, 8-pin ATX12V processor power supply connector. As for the drawbacks, the user may find the location of the 24-pin connector quite inconvenient, as it is placed in the middle of the PCB. Also the capacitors are seating too close to the processor Socket, which may cause some problems as well.

Capacitors are small, but still tall enough to hinder installation of certain cooling solutions. For example, you can forget about using a popular and very efficient Scythe Infinity cooler on EPoX EP-5P965+ GLI.

The chipset North Bridge is cooled down with a pretty large heatsink of traditional design. And the South Bridge is cooled with a relatively high silver-colored heatsink instead of the formal aluminum “pad”.

Actually, there are a few very interesting things in the area around the chipset South Bridge in the lower right corner of the EPoX EP-5P965+ GLI, so let’s take a closer look at it. We have already mentioned the heatsink, however, I should also point out that the South Bridge is the ICH8R chip that supports RAID for Serial ATA hard disk drives. Moreover, a little above the FDD connector there are two EZ-Buttons for system power on and rebooting, and the FDD connector itself is located in a better place than on most contemporary mainboards.

Heatsink, South Bridge, buttons and FDD connector are the definite highs of the EPoX EP-5P965+ GLI PCB design. As for the lows, we have to point out the pin-panel for case front connectors, which is aligned vertically and has no color coding. There are some markings on the PCB, of course, but they are very brief and written very tightly, so you will have hard times making out what they say. Another drawback is not jumping at you right away. We discovered it only after commencing the benchmarking: Clear CMOS jumper is right under the VGA card slot, so you will have to remove the graphics card if you need to clear the BIOS settings. As for the IDE support, its implementation on the EPoX EP-5P965+ GLI mainboard is pretty ambiguous.