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

The Bad

Where is the voltage configuration? Because the 3VCA is a Socket-370-only solution, there is no way of adjusting the core voltage supplied to the installed CPU since EPoX does not provide for the manual adjustment via the BIOS setup or via jumpers. This is very disappointing because one of the reasons most AnandTech readers are looking for a Socket-370 133A board with FC-PGA support is to overclock their FC-PGA Pentium IIIs, which don't always work at 100% stability at the default core voltage.

On the topic of overclocking, bumping up the FSB frequency to 140MHz or 150MHz on the 3VCA resulted in a system unable to boot into Windows. This was using our 550E that we had running at 825MHz (150MHz FSB) on the Tyan Trinity 400. If we were allowed the option to increase the core voltage from 1.60v to 1.65 or 1.70 we may have been able to attain a stable system at 770MHz or maybe even 825MHz but unfortunately, as we mentioned above, this feature was not provided for with the 3VCA.

Another major complaint about the 3VCA applies to most EPoX boards, being the availability of them. EPoX products are definitely more difficult to find than the bigger names like ASUS or even ABIT, but it's not nearly as bad as some of the lesser known manufacturers of decent boards such as Transcend.

The 686A South Bridge supports two USB headers, for a total of four on-board USB ports. Unfortunately, EPoX decided to place the USB2 connector (for the other 2 USB ports) at the very back of the motherboard, meaning if you want to have front mounted USB ports you would have to have a fairly long cable extending from the back of your case up to the front. We would have rather seen EPoX placed the USB2 connector at the other end of the board near the IDE ports.

USB Compatibility

• Number of Front Universal Serial Bus Root Ports: 2

• Number of Rear Universal Serial Bus Root Ports: 2

• USB IRQ Enable/Disable in BIOS: Yes

• USB Keyboard Support in BIOS: Yes

Recommended SDRAM

Recommended SDRAM: 1 x 128MB Corsair PC133 SDRAM; 1 x 128MB Mushkin PC133 SDRAM

SDRAM Tested: 1 x 128MB Corsair PC133 SDRAM; 1 x 128MB Mushkin PC133 SDRAM

Manufacturer: Corsair
Purchase Website: http://www.corsairmicro.com

Manufacturer: Mushkin
Purchase Website: http://www.mushkin.com