Epox 9NDA3+: A New Socket 939

BIOS: Epox 9NDA3+

Epox uses the familiar Award BIOS, so navigation will be familiar for most users.

Most of the options of interest to overclockers are contained in the Power BIOS Menu. This includes CPU speed, AGP speed, HT ratios, CPU ratios, and CPU/DIMM/AGP/Chipset voltage.

The only real enthusiast settings not found in Power BIOS are the DRAM timings, which are in a submenu under the Advanced Chipset Features.

The CPU can be adjusted over a speed range from 200MHz to 400MHz in 1MHz increments. This is a much better than normal range of CPU speeds

AGP can be fixed at any frequency from 66 to 100, but most users will probably leave it at 66 or 67.

The Epox offers HyperTransport adjustments to 5X (1000 HT).

Memory Voltage can be adjusted to 2.8V, which is adequate, but nothing that will excite overclockers. A range of 3.0V to 3.2V would have been much more useful for those who push the performance of their system.

The other part of high FSB clocking is CPU ratios or multipliers. The 9NDA3+ provides a wide range of 8 to 25X, but adjustments are in whole multipliers only. Keep in mind that while all Athlon 64 chips can be downclocked with lower ratios, only the FX chips are completely unlocked and can be set to higher than stock ratios. We confirmed that the ratios do work as they should on the Epox board.

vCore is surprisingly limited and coarse compared to past Epox designs. There are only 4 settings for vCore in +.05, +.10, +.15, and +.20. This is the most useful adjustment range for air overclocking, but finer controls would have been appreciated. The range will be considered too limited for users of water or phase-change cooling.

AGP voltage adjustment covers a broad range to 1.8V. This adjustment usually makes very little difference in overclocking.

Chipset voltage adjustments from 1.6V to 1.75V in useful .05V increments are provided in the Epox. This is very useful when trying to reach extreme overclocks on the nF3 Ultra chipset.

Many of the most used adjustments are in Power BIOS, so the Advanced Chipset menu is mainly DRAM Timings, HT Ratios, AGP aperture size, and shadowing control.

The nForce3 Ultra supports many integrated features. Most of these are controlled in the Integrated Peripherals menu. This includes an IDE Function Setup submenu where setup and adjustments are made to the nVidia RAID for SATA and IDE drives.