by Doors4ever
02/09/2007 | 03:30 PM
For about half a year already Intel Core 2 Duo processors can be easily purchased almost everywhere, but it is only now that the company is starting massive expansion of this architecture. The beginning of the year was marked with the arrival of the promising Core 2 Duo E4300, in Q2 Intel will announced Pentium E2xx and Celeron 4xx processors, the prices will drop and the CPUs on Core micro-architecture will come even into the budget market segment. As a result, even users with limited budget will be able to forget about the eternal choice between the cost and performance and purchase a Core CPU.
However, buying a new processor only takes you half way through. In order to get your investments to bring you the maximum benefits, the CPU needs to be overclocked and this is when an Intel P965 based mainboard will come in handy. Alternative chipsets definitely have their advantages as well as drawbacks. Moreover, mainboards for Intel processors on Nvidia chipsets mostly belong to the top price segment and the mainboards on ATI chipsets haven’t even started selling yet. And there is no guarantee that the situation will change for the better with the time. So, our interest towards Intel P965 based mainboards is absolutely justified. And today we are going to take a closer look at another new product – EPoX EP-5P965+ GLI mainboard.
The box is not rectangular, as it normally would be, but almost square, with a handle for easy transportation. The front side of the box looks very nice, but is hardly informative, while the back side of the box tells everything about the hardware and software functionality of the mainboard:
Some time ago in our abit AW9D-MAX mainboard review we complimented for abit’s approach to packaging stuff. But EPoX is trying not to fall behind on this one and also places all the mainboard’s accessories in an individual box. The box contains the following items:
EPoX EP-5P965+ GLI mainboard looks very nice. Let’s take a closer look at it and discuss its major features in greater detail.
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.
As we all know, Intel didn’t take into account the wishes of numerous computer users and introduced only Serial ATA interface support in its new chipsets. As a result, mainboard manufacturers have to fix the lack of IDE support on their own, and we – to pay extra for their efforts. As a rule, the mainboard is equipped with an additional onboard controller that ensures support of ATA hard disk drives and optical devices. EPoX Company decided to take another route, which they called EZ-IDE. Instead of the additional controller EPoX EP-5P965+ GLI mainboard features two SiI3811A converters, each capable of transforming one SATA chipset channel into IDE and adding another SATA channel to it.
There are special EZ-IDE cables that serve to connect the converters with the chipset: they are about four times shorter than the regular SATA cables.
Of course, EPoX Company claims that this is a much better way, because it requires no software support from the drivers. As a result it simplifies the installation and ensures that the devices will work fine in any operating systems. In my humble opinion, there are a few drawbacks here.
“Converted” IDE channel supports only one device and if we need to connect two, at the bottom there will be a big cable knot of two EZ-IDE, two IDE cables and some cables coming out of the case front panel and USB ports. Besides, we will lose one or two chipset SATA. The two additional SATA channels provided by the converters cannot be considered a fully-fledged replacement. Firstly, they do not support RAID, and secondly, you cannot connect a boot-up device to any of them. Finally, I think that a single controller providing two additional SATA channels and a single IDE ports supporting two devices should be cheaper and easier to lay out on the mainboard PCB than two converters, two IDE connectors and four SATA.
If we cannot make up our mind whether EZ-IDE should be considered an advantage or a drawback of the EPoX EP-5P965+ GLI mainboard, then the POST-codes indicator is a definite plus. We should also give due credit to the developers for very well-balanced quantity of PCI-E and PCI slots. There are three PCI slots on this mainboard, because there are much more cards with this interface in the market today. As for the graphics cards with the PCI-E x16 connector, the board will accommodate two of them, although the second one will work in PCI-E x4 mode. Another advantage of the EPoX EP-5P965+ GLI PCB design is an almost ideal back panel carrying both: old and new connectors. And as we have already mentioned above, there is a special bracket bundled with the mainboard that will bring you two additional USB ports to the back of your case.
Well, we would like to complete the list of drawbacks we uncovered with the availability of only three fan connectors, which is surely not enough for a contemporary system. More to that, all of them, except the CPU fan connector, are placed in far not the best spots.
At this point the conclusion shapes up pretty arguably. Some indisputable advantages of the EPoX EP-5P965+ GLI are diminished by some very evident drawbacks. Despite the great first impression, I would estimate the PCB design as something between “good” and “satisfactory”.
The list of EPoX EP-5P965+ GLI technical specs looks pretty impressive:
EPoX EP-5P965+ GLI | |
Processor | Socket LGA775 Intel Quad Core Q6000 series CPUs |
Chipset | Intel P965 + ICH8R |
Memory | Four 240-pin DDR2 SDRAM DIMM slots |
Expansion slots | 3 PCI (PCI v2.3) |
EZ-IDE | 2 IDE connectors (2 devices) via SiI3811A SATA-IDE converters |
USB | 10 USB 2.0 ports (4 on back panel) |
S-ATA | 6 S-ATA II ports with up to 300MB/s data transfer rate |
LAN | 1Gbit Ethernet by Realtek RTL8111B PCI-E x1 controller |
Sound | 2, 6 or 8 channels by HDA-compatible Realtek ALC883 codec |
I/O | EPOX EP1308 input/output controller |
BIOS: | 4MB Flash EEPROM Award Plug&Play BIOS |
Special features | KBPO (boot-up from keyboard) |
PowerBIOS | FSB and PCI frequencies adjustment with 1MHz increment |
Windows tools | Thunder Probe diagnostic monitoring utility |
Form-factor | 305mm x 245mm x 40mm, ATX |
The specs were taken from the manufacturer’s website.
The BIOS of EPoX EP-5P965+ GLI mainboard is based on Phoenix-Award code and doesn’t contain anything unusual or brand new. Its features are pretty common for EPoX mainboards, so if you have ever dealt with one, you should see nothing new.
Almost all the overclocking-friendly features are gathered in the Power BIOS section.
For the CPU with 266MHz nominal bus speed, the FSB frequency can be raised to 510MHz with 1MHz increment. In most cases it should be enough. It is also very convenient that you can enter the frequency value right from the keyboard.
However, if the CPU supports 200MHz bus frequency, the maximum you can raise to drops down to 350MHz, and for the CPUs with 133MHz bus – to 199MHz. It automatically implies that the highly promising Core 2 Duo E4300, for instance, which has already started appearing in stores will not clock beyond 3.15GHz, which is not enough for very well-overclockable processors from Intel Core family.
PCI Express bus frequency can be increased from 100MHz to 150MHz. theoretically, you can also change the multiplier, however, our Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 CPU had a locked multiplier, so we couldn’t check it out. As for the memory, the set of supported multipliers changes depending on the nominal bus frequency of the CPU.
A separate page is devoted to adjustable voltages. There are not that many of them, but all the important ones are there. The processor may receive up to +0.4V with 0.0125V increment, the chipset voltage may be raised by +0.3V with 0.1V increment, and the memory voltage – by +0.75V with 0.05V increment. These ranges are amore than enough for successful overclocking. A very convenient feature is that you see the nominal voltage and the resulting voltage after adjustment side by side.
You can change the main memory timings in the Advanced Chipset Features section. There are few of them there, just like on most mainboards built around Intel chipsets. It is nice that at least you can adjust each parameter independently.
Overclocking fans will be interested in PC Health Status section, and it has always been implemented very well by EPoX. You can control and monitor all major voltages, temperatures, fan rotation speeds, and all this data is displayed on the screen on system start-up. Just for a short time, but quite enough to notice if anything is wrong.
If necessary, you can also set up the CPU fan rotation speed adjustment option depending on the processor temperature reading.
As you can see, only the lower maximum FSB frequency for CPUs with less than 266MHz bus speed may be considered a drawback here. Otherwise, the BIOS of the EPoX EP-5P965+ GLI mainboard deserved a “good” mark.
However, the mainboard got a good mark only for theoretical features. The situation with practical results turned out dramatically bad.
First of all, I was pretty surprised with the fact that Watch Dog Function parameter in the Power NIOS section is disabled by default. If I am not mistaken, EPoX was the first company to implement correctly automatic system restart in case of over-overclocking, when the initialization process cannot even be completed. It turned out that this parameter had been disabled for a reason: it was hardly operational. We had to restart the system 6-7 times in a row, before it would finally restart correctly. And we had to be so persistent, because the Clear CMOS jumper is practically useless, due to its extremely inconvenient location on the PCB, which we have already mentioned above.
But this is not the end yet. After the system rebooting in case of excessive overclocking, all normal mainboards would usually ask you if you would like to enter BIOS Setup to correct the wrongly set parameters. EPoX EP-5P965+ GLI skips that and just keeps on booting the OS. As far as we remember, only Gigabyte mainboards used to be so unfriendly to overclocking fans in the past. Could EPoX have got a new developer team?
For our overclocking tests we used Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 processor that can work stably at around 500MHz FSB with appropriate increase of the chipset North Bridge voltage and processor Vcore. We started with a relatively low frequency of 430MHz FSB, but even in this case we overestimated the mainboard’s abilities. It only managed to boot successfully at 310MHz FSB! Unbelievably low result!
AT that time we assumed that the mainboard didn’t work correctly with the memory, since CPU-Z utility reported a CAS Latency of 3, while it was set to 5 in the BIOS. This supposition proved partially true, because when we set the memory timings to Auto (for Corsair TWIN2X2048-6400C4 the nominal settings were 4-4-4-12), the system started at 330MHz FSB, although the CPU-Z reported the timing settings of 3-6-6-23. This extremely low overclocking result should be taken as the final. The stability in this case was tested with a couple of Prime95 utilities running simultaneously.
We looked for memory with higher nominal timings and decided to check out Patriot PDC21G8000ELK (5-5-5-15). The mainboard, however, set even more ridiculous timings for these modules: 3-4-4-10, but the system would now boot at 360MHz FSB. I believe that this improvement results from the fact that total amount of system memory has been lowered from 2GB in case of Corsair TWIN2X2048-6400C4 memory to 1GB in case of Patriot modules.
I assume that awful overclocking capabilities of this mainboard have a lot to do with its inability to adjust the FSB Strap. The indirect evidence of that is the lowered maximum FSB frequency for CPUs supporting 200MHz and 133MHz bus. However, it is not the reasons but the results that matter most. And the results indicate that EPoX EP-5P965+ GLI is incapable of overclocking Intel Core processors.
EPoX EP-5P965+ GLI mainboard started selling pretty late. This is not a good thing, but not a dramatic thing either. In the end, there are different strategies; you can either rush a new “hot” but relatively raw product into the market right after the new chipset launch and then deal with the problems, or take your time and design a product close to being perfect before beginning to sell. DFI, for instance, doesn’t have any Intel P965 based mainboards in their product range yet, although some DFI Infinity P965 pictures have already surfaced in a few websites. So, the delayed launch of EPoX EP-5P965+ GLI is quite normal and understandable. Could be understandable if we saw a real mainboard instead of a prototype.
Our theoretical reasoning is refuted completely by Asus and Gigabyte, who managed to launch the entire family of Intel P965 based mainboards right after the chipset launch. At this time they are already preparing second and third mainboard revisions, absolutely new models, although even the very first mainboard revisions copes quite nicely with all the overclocking. So what were the guys at EPoX doing all this time? Because even the second BIOS version released in the end of last year didn’t solve the problems.
I hope that EPoX EP-5P965+ GLI will be able to run stably and reliably in nominal mode, that no other problems get uncovered during long-term operation. This poor overclocking result is comparable with what we would squeeze out of the new mainboard revisions of i945 based solutions. However, EPoX EP-5P965+ GLI cannot stand even this comparison, because all i945 based mainboards boast one great advantage: they cost half the price of EPoX EP-5P965+ GLI. So, it is really hard to recommend this mainboard even to those users who do not intend to perform any overclocking.
Frankly speaking, I do not want you to think that EPoX EP-5P965+ GLI is a complete failure. It is not true. Each product has issues and bugs in the PCB layout, BIOS features, even software. Thunder Probe monitoring utility is a significant step forward compared with the USDM (Unified System Diagnostic Manager) that used to come with EPoX mainboards back in the days. However, for some reason the developers paid more attention to the interface design rather than its flexibility and functionality. Besides, tools like that are primarily used for CPU temperature monitoring, however, the reports turned out to be lower than the actual temperatures and hence couldn’t be trusted. So, why would one need a beautiful but complex Thunder Probe tool, if we had to use CoreTemp during the test session?
First look is often deceiving. Having dwelled on the overclocking features of the EPoX EP-5P965+ GLI and uncovered a lot of issues all over the place we felt very anxious to put it aside as soon as possible. So, far not all the Intel P965 based mainboards are alike… However, I am sure you know it already. The only question that keeps bothering me is: aren’t EPoX ashamed of selling something like that?