Motherboards in 2001 Preview: Part 1

EPoX Boasts new Features

We actually missed the EPoX booth during Comdex, but they were nice enough to offer us a visit to their office in Southern California, where we were able to look at a lot of new products.  So far EPoX has two DDR solutions, one for AMD and one for Intel processors.  They are planning on releasing a board using the Intel i850 chipset as well, but probably with limited availability because of the high price of RDRAM.

This is a snapshot of their shelf holding most of their newest products. 

There are two things that EPoX will start to include with their motherboards.  The first is what they call the “Window Overclock.”  Similar to the Fuzzy Logic from Microstar, EPoX supplies you with software, called Boostek, so that users can overclock their CPU directly from within Windows.

The second thing is the implementation of their “P80P POST” (Power On Self Test) on the motherboard itself.  Basically, the P80P is a POST card that reports the different stages during a boot up process, so if something is wrong with the computer and prevents it from boot up, you can use the code shown on the two 8 segment LED’s to look up what could have gone wrong.  Again, it is something similar to the D-LED technology from Microstar, but the P80P POST can provide up to 128 states - much more than the 16 states provided by  Microstar’s D-LED.  However, EPoX will only include this feature in their high-end boards.