Manufacturer: EPoX
Price: $77.99

The Taiwanese company EPoX is back for their eighth motherboard review here at Overclockers Online! They have for us yet another value-oriented board; however, this time it is for the AMD K8 socket 939 platform.



Before we get started on the review, we should get some background information on the board itself. Unlike the majority of s939 boards out there, the EPoX EP-9U1697 GLI is not based on the NVIDIA nForce4 chipset. It is instead based on the ULi M1697 chipset which provides a comparable featureset at a lower price; the M1697 even supports SLI, renamed GLI. However, due to NVIDIA's recent acquisition of ULi Electronics, GLI is not officially supported in versions of NVIDIA's ForceWare driver set following 81.98 - not a good thing from the consumer's perspective as this requires the use of "hacked" drivers or unsupported versions, possibly resulting in decreased performance.



No matter the ethics behind NVIDIA's acquisition and control of ULi, let us objectively evaluate EPoX's board and see if it lives up to EPoX's history of producing high quality motherboards at a fraction of the cost of competing products.