EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra Mainboard Review: Meet NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra Chipset!

by Ilya Gavrichenkov
01/12/2005 | 05:15 AM

The new PCI Express bus first came to PC users back in the early summer on mainboards for Pentium 4 processors, while the Athlon 64 community had to live on with older AGP 8x and PCI buses. Of course, it was not satisfying at all for most users, especially as the leading graphics card makers focused primarily on the PCI Express x16 solutions. However, there was no way out for a while: Intel was the only chipset maker then to have mastered mass production of PCI Express-supporting chipsets and remained such throughout the last summer and fall. And as you know, Intel doesn’t produce chipsets for the competitor’s CPUs.

We should acknowledge the fact that back in the early fall VIA and NVIDIA, the two companies that are challenging each other for the leadership in supplying chipsets for the Athlon 64 platform, announced their new chipsets that boasted PCI Express support among their features. To our regret, however, these companies are often practicing “paper-only” announcements when the introduction of a new product and the beginning of mass shipments of the actual silicon are set quite a wide distance apart from one another. So no wonder we haven’t seen any mainboards based on the new PCI Express-supporting chipsets from NVIDIA or VIA until very recently in retail.

Right before the beginning of the new year, first Socket 939 mainboards featuring PCI Express bus arrived to the shops, although in small quantities. Of course, we can’t leave this event unattended and will offer you a series of reviews of PCI Express mainboards for the Athlon 64 processor.

NVIDIA was the first manufacturer to supply its new chipsets for the Athlon 64 at a more or less regular rate, so our today’s review will be about a mainboard based on a modification of the long-awaited nForce4 chipset. The mainboard comes from EPoX, but before taking a closer look at it we would like to draw your attention to the features of NVIDIA’s new chipset. It deserves very thorough consideration, I should say.

NVIDIA nForce4 Features

First of all, I would like to point out that the new nForce4 family of chipsets for the Athlon 64 platform is a further development of the nForce3 Ultra chipset which earned a widest recognition among the users. The main innovation introduced in the nForce4 is of course the support of the PCI Express bus. Besides that, however, there are a few more surprises in the nForce4 – we will dwell on each of them shortly.

The implementation of the PCI Express bus in NVIDIA’s new chipset is determined by the architecture of the latter. By the way, the nForce4 is a single-chip solution: the traditional North and South Bridges are combined in one chip. It’s possible because in Athlon 64 systems the memory controller is located in the CPU.

As a result, there’s no additional bus that links the Bridges and limits the data-transfer speed between its controllers, so the chipset-integrated controllers of the nForce4 interact more effectively than in two-chip chipsets.

The second advantage of the single-chip solution comes directly from the fact that the PCI Express lines are implemented via one single controller. In the competing solutions, different chips are responsible for the support of PCI Express x16 and PCI Express x1 buses, but in the nForce4 – one controller manages all of them. As a result, nForce4 appears more flexible in configuring the supported 20 PCI Express lines. Particularly, the mainboard makers can theoretically refuse to implement PCI Express x1 buses, but join them into a PCI Express x4 bus, or split the PCI Express x16 bus into two x8 ones. So, the nForce4 has many surprises up the sleeve for us, one of which is its ability to support more than one graphics card with the PCI Express interface (the so-called Scalable Link Interface or SLI mode).

Another innovation in the nForce4, which makes it one of the most advanced chipsets in the market today, is the second-generation hard disk drive controller. The controller supports four Parallel ATA and four Serial ATA channels simultaneously – none of the competing chipsets can boast the same. nForce4 is also the first chipset to almost fully support the Serial ATA II specification and features like “hot swapping” and Native Command Queuing, and an interface bandwidth up to 3Gbit/s. So, nForce4 is ready for the arrival of the next generation of hard disk drives.

nForce4 has also made some progress as far as RAID arrays are concerned. Particularly, it supports RAID levels 0, 1 and 0+1, which can be made up of drives with any interface, including Parallel ATA. The array can be managed from Windows with the help of a special utility called nvRAID.

Note also that the hard disk drive controller integrated into the nForce4 chipset has a kind of dual-channel architecture as it connects to the chipset arbiter along two independent buses. It ensures higher bandwidth and smaller latencies when the processor is intensively working with the disk subsystem.

NVIDIA has also increased the number of USB 2.0 ports in its new system logic: ten ports are available now against eight they used to have before.

The networking capabilities of the nForce4 need a special mention. In fact, nForce3 Ultra, the previous model, had the most advanced networking functionality, which was not surprising at all since NVIDIA had been collaborating with 3Com when developing the integrated network controller. This functionality has been improved further in the new chipset family.

nForce4 has an integrated Gigabit Ethernet controller, but also features an integrated hardware Secure Networking Engine called ActiveArmor. It is the last feature that distinguishes the network controller of the nForce4 from its predecessor used in nForce3 Ultra. You can enjoy the advantages of the new technology if you use the firewall utility NVIDIA supplies with its network driver.

The firewall from NVIDIA is advanced enough and isn’t in any way inferior to its analogs from other companies. The firewall supplied with nForce3 Ultra-based mainboards was a purely software solution, but NVIDIA Firewall 2.0 for the nForce4 is a combination of software and hardware means that perform some packet-filtering operations in the ActiveArmor engine integrated into the chipset instead of the CPU.

In fact, in case of NVIDIA’s Firewall 2.0 the only work the CPU has to do is to adjust the parameters of the hardware ActiveArmor engine. All the major workload connected with processing and sorting the network packets is laid upon the chipset. It means that NVIDIA Firewall 2.0 implemented in nForce4 chipset family doesn’t load the CPU as much as third-party firewalls do.

An ordinary firewall loads the CPU up by 75%

NVIDIA Firewall 2.0 uses the hardware ActiveArmor engine to reduce the CPU load to 10%

NVIDIA Firewall 2.0 is controlled via a Web-based shell which resembles the interface you use to configure hardware firewalls. For this shell to work you need the Apache web-server which is installed on your computer along with the software for the nForce4’s network controller. Thanks to that, NVIDIA Firewall 2.0 can be managed remotely.

As you see, NVIDIA has paid due attention to the software it supplies for its new nForce4 chipsets. The nvRAID and Network Access Manager utilities are not the only tools you receive, though. The nTune program, well-known to PC enthusiasts, also ships with nForce4-based mainboards. This utility is intended for configuring and monitoring the system from Windows.

nTune utility keeps track of the system temperatures, voltages and frequencies. You can automatically or manually adjust the parameters of the CPU, memory and GPU for better performance or noiseless work, update the mainboard BIOS, etc.

As for the CPU models supported, the NVIDIA nForce4 can clock the HyperTransport bus at up to 1GHz frequency. It means this family of chipsets can be used with a wide range of mainboards with Socket 939, Socket 754 and even Socket 940.

Overclockers should enjoy the ability of the nForce4 to clock all the buses asynchronously: different clock generators are used for the CPU and for the PCI Express bus. Moreover, the internal arbiter of this chipset is more tolerant to deviations of the bus frequencies from their defaults than the arbiter of Intel’s i925/i915 chipsets. As a result, nForce4-based mainboards increase excellently their core frequency, easily overcoming the 300MHz mark on the clock generator for the CPU frequency. So, these mainboards are going to become a success in the overclocking community.

The last thing we have to tell you is the modifications existing in the nForce4 family. The topmost model of the series is the NVIDIA nForce4 SLI targeted at enthusiastic users who are ready to shell out above $150 for a mainboard. As the name suggests, NVIDIA offers this chipset for users who want to use a pair of graphics cards at once, in the SLI mode. To enable this, the chipset allows splitting the PCI Express x16 bus in two x8 ones for two PCI Express graphics cards to work simultaneously in one system. The user configures the PCI Express x16 bus with the help of a special card installed onto the mainboard.

The nForce4 Ultra is a middle-range model in the nForce4 family. It is going to become a foundation for mainboards priced within $100-$150 range. This chipset has all the above-described functionality, but lacks the ability to configure the PCI Express x16 bus. It means this chipset is intended for system configurations with a single graphics card. Well, some resourceful mainboard makers do produce SLI-supporting, nForce4 Ultra-based mainboards by joining two or four PCI Express x1 lines for the second graphics card.

The ordinary nForce4 is a junior model for inexpensive solutions. This chipset is considered a budget solution for two reasons. First, it lacks the hardware security system: ActiveArmor is disabled in it. And second, it doesn’t support Serial ATA II.

EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra: Specifications and Accessories

So, the EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra is the first nForce4 Ultra-based mainboard to come into our test lab. This product looks very similar to another hit from the same manufacturer, the EP-9NDA3+ on the nForce3 Ultra chipset, but it now has the long-anticipated PCI Express slots in addition to Socket 939. You can see them in the photo below:

The list of formal specifications of the EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra mainboard follows:

The 9NPA+ Ultra is so far the only nForce4 Ultra-based product in EPoX’ product line-up, and its PCB doesn’t imply the installation of optional components. So, when purchasing an EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra mainboard, you can be sure the characteristics will be the same as listed above.

The accessories supplied with the mainboard include just the bare minimum:

• CD with drivers and utilities;
• Two Serial ATA cables;
• One round 80-pin Parallel ATA cable and a round FDD cable;
• A bracket for the back panel of the case with two FireWire ports;
• I/O shield for the back panel of your system case;
• User manual.

The list of the accessories is not yet fully confirmed, and new items may appear in it. Particularly, the manufacturer will probably add a universal screwdriver and heatsinks for the MOSFETs of the CPU voltage regulator.

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.

EPoX made the following use of the ten USB 2.0 ports supported by nForce4 Ultra: four ports are placed on the mainboard back panel, and the remaining six ports are implemented as three onboard pin-connectors. Unfortunately, the manufacturer doesn’t add a USB bracket for the back panel of the system case carrying High-Speed USB ports. In other words, even if you have an advanced PC case with the USB ports on the front panel, you will still hardly be able to use all the USB ports initially supported by EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra.

VIA VT6307 controller ensures the implementation of two 400Mbit/s FireWire ports present on the EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra mainboard. These ports are also laid out as onboard pin-connectors, but a FireWire bracket for the back panel of your system case comes together with the board.

We’ve already discussed the networking capabilities of the nForce4 Ultra chipset above, and they are all present in the reviewed mainboard, including Secure Networking Engine and NVIDIA Firewall 2.0.

For a practical evaluation of the integrated network controller efficiency, we carried out a brief test of the bandwidth and the CPU load during data transfer. We ran the test with the firewall enabled and disabled as well as with the hardware Secure Networking Engine on and off. The NTttcp utility from Microsoft Windows DDK was our measurement tool.

We’ve got very curious results. First of all, take note of the high effective bandwidth provided by the network controller built into nForce4 Ultra – it is close to the theoretical peak of 1000 megabits per second! The second fact to consider is that the Secure Networking Engine isn’t just a marketing advantage of the chipset, but a really useful mechanism that considerably reduces the CPU load when the computer is on a local network. The effect from the Secure Networking Engine is especially strong when you also use NVIDIA Firewall 2.0 – the CPU load is reduced by a half in that case. If the firewall is off, the SNE still reduces the CPU workload quite noticeably.

You should be aware that the SNE can only be enabled by NVIDIA’s own firewall, while third-party firewalls will still load the CPU substantially when the network traffic is intensive.

The last thing to pay attention to with respect to the EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra mainboard is RAID support. There are two Parallel ATA-133 channels and four Serial ATA ports on board that support NCQ, hot swapping and data-transfer rate of up to 3Gbit/s. All drives attached to these channels can be united into arrays of levels 0, 1, 0+1, and JBOD, irrespective of their interface. All RAID-related operations are performed on the EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra as NVIDIA had intended – the nvRAID utility works without a glitch, so we only have to measure the performance of the integrated RAID controller and compare it to a competing solution, the RAID controller from the i925/i915 chipsets (found in the ICH6R South Bridge). We tested the performance of a RAID0 array made up of two Serial ATA drives (Western Digital Raptor WD360GD) using the HDD Test suite from Futuremark PCMark04.

As you can see from the obtained results, the two channels of the RAID-controller integrated into the nForce4 Ultra positively affect the speed of simple file copying. In other cases Intel controller looks preferable, but this only proves that the buffering algorithms in Intel Application Accelerator are more efficient during ordinary use of the disk subsystem than NVIDIA’s algorithms. nForce4 Ultra potentially has every chance to become a faster solution, if the software part of the RAID implementation gets better optimized.

PCB Design

The design of the EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra isn’t too complex as it has very few additional controllers and a standard number of connectors and slots. Nevertheless, EPoX’ engineering team didn’t manage to improve the PCB layout in any way. On the contrary, they even added a few pretty unsuccessful issues. Let me explain what I mean here.

First, the ATX power supply connector isn’t in the best place. It is right behind the CPU socket, and the attached power cable hangs above the processor cooler, hindering the air flow. By the way, we have the new type of the connector here – with 24 pins. The additional 12V power connector is located next to the main one, behind Socket 939.

Second, EPoX’ decision to remove all the connectors from the area in front of the DIMM slots seems absolutely unjustified. The FDD and IDE connectors on the EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra are too close to the PCI and PCI Express x16 slots.

Third, the placement of the PCI slots to the left of the PCI Express x16 slot doesn’t seem right, either. If a pretty powerful graphics card is installed, its cooling system will block the nearest PCI slot, so the user will have only two PCI slots left, which may be insufficient for the today’s systems.

Among minor flaws, we could mention the difficult access to the Clear CMOS jumper when the mainboard is already mounted into the system case.

Well, EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra definitely boasts some great advantages. The mainboard carries an integrated diagnostics POST controller, a very helpful tool for localizing hardware problems. Next to the LED-based POST indicator, there are reset and power buttons that help to use the mainboard when you use it outside the system case.

Although EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra looks very ordinarily – the mainboard doesn’t have that many colored slots or connectors, and its textolite is of the traditional green color – the manufacturer made sure that the owners of transparent system cases will be pleased. There are three very bright LED indicators on the mainboard that indicate if the chipset, DIMM slots and CPU are powered. They are not very useful as indicators, but make the mainboard more appealing visually.

On the mainboard back panel you find the following ports and connectors: two PS/2 ports for the keyboard and mouse, one serial and one parallel port, four High-Speed USB ports, a network RJ-45 port without diagnostics LEDs, six audio jacks, an optical/coaxial SPDIF output. One more serial (COM) port is available as an onboard header, so you can use it, too.

The chipset is cooled by a large and flat heatsink with a fan like those used on graphics cards. This proves to be enough for cooling nForce4 Ultra chipset, even though it boasts pretty complex architecture.

The CPU voltage regulator is a three-channel one on EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra. The MOSFETs in this circuit are not cooled at all, but they do not get very hot during work – the air stream from the CPU cooler is enough for cooling them. The capacitors you see onboard come from the Taiwanese HER-MEI and the Japanese Sanyo. So far we haven’t heard any complaints from the users stating that there are problems with these components.

Lastly we would like to mention that EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra allows installing massive coolers, even the new gigantic coolers from Zalman, as all large components and slots are moved away from the CPU socket. You can only face actual problems if you are using DDR modules of a non-standard size, like the PRO series modules from Corsair.

BIOS and Overclocking

The BIOS of EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra is based on the microcode from Award-Phoenix and has the ordinary interface with all the necessary options for configuring the buses and the peripherals. Added to the basic features is EPoX’ exclusive Magic Health technology – when passing the POST procedure, the mainboard can show onscreen not only the basic parameters of the CPU and memory, but also information about the temperatures, fan speeds and voltages. This is especially useful for overclockers as you can have a comprehensive view of your system status before even the OS boots up.

Let’s get right to the overclocking-related options of the BIOS Setup since EPoX positions its product as an overclocking-friendly mainboard. The speedup options are found on the Power BIOS Feature page.

When on this page, you can do the following:

• Change the frequency of the CPU clock generator from 200 to 400MHz with 1MHz increment;
• Independently adjust the frequency of the PCI Express bus from 100MHz to 145MHz with 1MHz increment;
• Select the memory frequency from a list of standard values: 100/133/166/200MHz for DDR200/DDR266/DDR333/DDR400 SDRAM;
• Manually reduce the CPU frequency multiplier (8x is the smallest value);
• Increase the CPU voltage above the default by 0.35V with 0.025V increment;
• Manually select the memory voltage, from 2.5V to 3.1V with 0.1V increment;
• Increase the chipset voltage from the standard 1.5V to 1.8V with 0.1V increment.

As you see, EPoX did its best to please overclockers; the BIOS Setup of EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra has everything necessary to give a speed boost to your processor as well as to your memory. Besides changing the memory frequency, you can manually select the timings Tcl, Trcd, Tras, Trp, and choose the 1T/2T Memory Timings mode.

Well, an abundance of overclocking-related options in the BIOS Setup doesn’t guarantee that the actual overclocking will go smoothly. So, we can’t move along without checking the maximum possible frequency of the clock generator in practice. We took an Athlon 64 3800+ CPU (2.4GHz frequency) and reduced its multiplier to 8x. In order to prevent the memory potential from limiting our overclocking results, we reduced the memory frequency to the values it was sure to support.

So, here is the description of our overclocking experiments. Right from the start we managed to raise the frequency of the clock generator from the default 200MHz to 240MHz. At this clock rate, the system wouldn’t start up at all, not to mention booting up the OS. But we were sure we didn’t hit the limit since the stability had been excellent at 239MHz. So, we began to search for the limiting factor.

An increase of the chipset voltage from 1.5V to 1.7V gave us little hope: the system started but the clock frequency generator showed 240MHz. However, it was a way too early to celebrate: the system couldn’t pass the POST procedure at 242MHz already.

The real limiting factor was easy to identify, though. It was the HyperTransport bus which frequency grew up too much since we left its multiplier at default (5x). Fortunately, EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra offers you the control over the HyperTransport multiplier, and we dropped it from 5x to 4x.

The mainboard woke up after that and we could continue our overclocking tests. The nest time we faced stability problems the clock generator frequency equaled 289MHz. Remembering our previous experience, we simply reduced the HyperTransport multiplier again, bringing it down to 3x.

Of course, it helped again. We managed to reach 301MHz on the clock generator. Although the HyperTransport bus didn’t seem to be a limiting factor anymore, the reduction of its multiplier to 2x helped again.

With this multiplier we continued our overclocking till we met the frequency ceiling of the CPU. So, our experience suggests that EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra is capable of working at frequencies of the clock generator above 300MHz. The only factor that hinders this overclocking is the growth of the frequency of the HyperTransport bus above its default 1000MHz. If you reduce the frequency multiplier of this bus, your overclocking won’t be limited at all on the EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra.

The results of our overclocking tests are listed in the following table:

We would like to note that it’s easy to overclock on EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra: if the mainboard cannot start up after you changed the BIOS Setup parameters, it returns the parameters to its default values and restarts automatically. That’s why we never had to try reach for the Clear CMOS jumper during our overclocking tests.

As for the hardware monitoring capabilities of this mainboard, it allows to control the temperatures of the CPU and the system, the speeds of the three fans that can be attached to it, and the seven basic voltages. The sample of the mainboard we had for our tests didn’t display the CPU temperature correctly, but we hope off-the-shelf products will do it right.

EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra also supports Smart FAN technology that controls the CPU fan rotation speed depending on the CPU temperature. You can choose a desirable CPU temperature and the mainboard will regulate the fan speed to maintain it. EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra also supports AMD Cool’n’Quiet technology. The combination of these two technologies allows building a noiseless and power-thrifty computer.

Software

Mainboard makers have recently been very careful about the selection of the software titles they supply with their products. Besides older versions of popular programs, the software bundle now often includes hardware monitoring, overclocking and other utilities developed by the mainboard manufacturer, so we are going to check out these programs in our reviews, too.

The software pack you receive with EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra consists of two parts: programs developed by NVIDIA for its nForce4 chipset and utilities from EPoX.

We’ve discussed the first part (nvMixer, nvRAID and Network Access Manager) in detail above. Unfortunately, we cannot add the useful utility called nvTune to this list as it didn’t work with EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra correctly.

As for the second part of the software pack, EPoX says it is going to consist of the following utilities:

• EPoX USDM, a utility for hardware overclocking;
• Magic Flash, a utility for updating the BIOS via the Internet;
• Magic Screen Utility, a utility for choosing the picture to be shown during the POST procedure.

Right now, however, these utilities don’t support EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra, although they are universal for all EPoX mainboards. So, we have to postpone their discussion till better times.

Testbed and Methods

We will end this review of EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra mainboard and NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra chipset by offering you the results of our traditional performance tests. Since there are yet no other chipsets for Athlon 64 that would support the PCI Express bus, we have to compare the speed of EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra against that of a mainboard (8N Neo2 Platinum from MSI) based on the previous model of the chipset, the nForce3 Ultra. In order to ensure fair and correct comparison, we use two analogous RADEON X800 XT graphics cards with AGP 8x and PCI Express x16 interfaces. Otherwise, the test platforms were identical.

So, we used the following hardware in our tests:

• AMD Athlon 64 3800+ CPU (2.4GHz, 512KB L2 cache);
• Mainboards:
  • EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra (NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra);
  • MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum (NVIDIA nForce3 Ultra);
• 1024MB DDR400 SDRAM (Corsair CMX512-3200XLPRO, 2x512MB, 2-2-2-10).
• Graphics cards:
  • PowerColor RADEON X800 XT (AGP 8x, 500MHz/500MHz);
  • PowerColor RADEON X800 XT (PCI Express x16, 500MHz/500MHz).
• Maxtor MaXLine III 250GB hard disk drive (Serial ATA-150).

We performed our tests in Windows XP SP2 operating system.

Since EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra allows increasing the frequency of the clock generator to 300MHz, we decided to add the performance results after overclocking, too. So, we tested this mainboard two times:

1. With the CPU working in its default mode (12x200MHz=2.4GHz)
2. When the frequency of the clock generator is increased (8x300MHz=2.4GHz).

Thus we will see if overclocking the clock generator is beneficial at all.

In the 8x300MHz mode the frequency of the HyperTransport bus was 900MHz (3x300MHz), and the memory was clocked at 600MHz (2.4GHz / 8). The memory timings were set to 2.5-4-4-8. By the way, among the memory modules we had at hand during our tests, only Corsair CMX512-4400C25PT could work that fast (as DDR600 SDRAM).

The CPU-Z screenshots below show you the parameters of the CPU at overclocking:

Performance

And here are the results of our tests:

You see that EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra is somewhat slower than the MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum in the tests, yet we can’t admit that nForce4 Ultra is a slower chipset than nForce3 Ultra – the BIOS of the EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra still requires some improvement and future BIOS updates may also improve the performance of this mainboard.

It is much more interesting to take a closer look at the results of EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra at the two frequencies of the clock generator: 200MHz and 300MHz. You can see that we get a small bonus (about 1-2%) by overclocking the generator, so this overclocking would only make sense if you want to overclock the CPU. Higher base frequency doesn’t bring any speed advantages since it requires a reduction of the HyperTransport frequency and a setting less efficient memory timings.

Conclusion

EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra is the first mainboard on nForce4 Ultra to enter our test lab, and it would be rather hasty to make any final judgments about the chipset yet. Still, we can say that EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra is going to be an interesting product due to the chipset used and the efforts of the EPoX engineers invested into its development. Combining a lot of useful features with excellent overclockability, this mainboard is going to make a good buy (we think its price won’t be very high). EPoX’ product range includes many mainboards that have become hits among overclockers and the 9NPA+ Ultra may become one, too.

Highs:

• Overclocking-friendly features, very high overclockability;
• Good stability and reliability;
• Excellent networking capabilities, including ActiveArmor and NVIDIA Firewall 2.0;
• Four Serial ATA channels and two Parallel ATA channels with support of RAID 0, 1 and 0+1;
• Eight-channel sound;
• Support of FireWire;
• Integrated POST controller.

Lows:

• Rather low performance;
• Awkward PCB design;
• Not very rich set of accessories.