EPoX EP-3VCA Apollo Pro 133A Socket-370 ATX

Courtesy of the 694X North Bridge (essentially what makes this chipset the Apollo Pro 133A), you can use either VC100/VC133 Virtual Channel SDRAM or regular PC100/PC133 SDRAM. But since the availability of VC-SDRAM is so scarce, and because of the negligible performance advantage the Virtual Channel technology offers over regular SDRAM, you probably won't be too impressed by the chipset's VC-SDRAM support.

The 694X North Bridge provides for full AGP 4X compliance, a small step up from its predecessor, the 693A, with its AGP 2X limitation. From a performance perspective, AGP 4X doesn't really offer that much of a performance increase over AGP 2X, at least using the current crop of graphics accelerators and games. But since the 694X is currently available at virtually the same cost as the older 693A, it makes the most sense for EPoX to capitalize on AGP 4X's marketing value with the 3VCA. Because of its AGP 4X support, the 3VCA boasts a universal AGP connector without any 3.3v or 1.5v notches thus allowing the card to accept any AGP 1X, 2X or 4X compliant graphics card.

The AMR slot, wedged in between the first PCI slot and the universal AGP connector is driven by the VIA VT1611A AC'97 codec. While the 686A South Bridge features an integrated AC'97 controller, the codec is still placed on board. For system integrators the AMR slot is an excellent way to keep costs down while providing for a bundled modem, but for end users its generally a waste of a slot.

Because of the small Socket-370 connector EPoX was able to perfect the layout of the board by placing the ATX power connector at the lower right hand corner of the PCB, out of the way of the rest of the motherboard. Surrounding the Socket-370 connector are ten 1000uF capacitors as well as a handful of smaller caps designed to help stabilize the power signals supplied to the CPU, thus attempting to improve the board's stability. From our tests, the 3VCA ended up being a board of average stability, which is much more than what can be said for some of the other 133A boards we've looked at. By average stability we mean stability about on par with that of ABIT's BH6 but definitely not as high as the MX64 from AOpen which uses the same 133A chipset.

One of EPoX's trademark features in the past has been their Easy Set Single Jumper (ESSJ) configuration which is essentially the use of a single jumper to select what FSB setting you would like to run at. The way the settings work on the is a bit different than the conventional ESSJ on older EPoX boards in that the jumper actually controls the AGP divider and what FSB settings are available in the BIOS. Choosing a setting between 66MHz and 83MHz results in an 1/1 AGP to FSB ratio and allows FSB frequencies from 66MHz up to 83MHz to be selected from within the BIOS setup. Picking anything between 100MHz and 124MHz (inclusive) results in a 2/3 AGP ratio and allows those FSB settings to be selected from within the BIOS. And finally selecting the 133MHz, 140MHz or 150MHz settings enable the 1/2 AGP ratio and let you select from those settings in the BIOS. You can consider this setup as being sort of a pseudo-jumperless setup requiring only a small bit of configuration.

Hardware monitoring is provided for by the 686A South Bridge, unfortunately there are no external thermistor headers so the only two monitored temperatures are that of the CPU and that of the South Bridge itself.

Bundled with the board is an average manual, lacking in the usual areas of installation and BIOS configuration but the most valuable part of the bundle is the GHOST 5.1 software that EPoX provides on the included CD. GHOST is a disk imaging solution that allows you to create backup images of your data and is quite useful for transferring data from one hard drive to another.