Value Dual Socket-370 Motherboard Roundup - August 2001

Acorp 6A815EPD

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The Acorp 6A815EPD is the only SMP we've seen using the Intel i815EP chipset. There is one reason for the lack of such boards - Intel does not officially support SMP operation with the i815EP, although Acorp has obviously shown us that it is possible. Of course, the i815EP has a few inherent disadvantages in the SMP market, most notably the 512MB memory limit, which may be enough for the vast majority of individual users, but simply won't cut it for any powerful server.

The Intel i815 MCH supporting SMP.

The Intel 82801BA ICH2.

The performance of the board is pretty good, showing that SMP runs smoothly on the 6A815EPD. There is quite a bit of space around both CPU sockets, so you should have no problem installing largeer HSF units. On the other hand, the board has only three DIMM slots, which is inline with the chipset spec. Remember that those chipset specs require the dropping back to PC100 memory speeds when using more than 4 banks of memory.

The 6A815EPD was quite stable in our testing under non-overclocked circumstances, but didn't fare too well when it comes time to overclock.. In fact we weren't able to perform any overclocking test on the board, since setting the FSB to 134MHz would cause the system to crash immediately upon boot up. It's a bit odd that a 1MHz FSB overclock would take a board from rock solid to completely unstable, but that's what happened on our evaluation sample.

The board also features a RAID setup, using the same Promise PDC20265R controller we've seen elsewhere to provide RAID 0 and RAID 1 functionality. Like most other boards that use the Promise controller, RAID 0+1 is not available despite the fact that the controller supports it. This is most likely a licensing issue with Promise that is designed to lower the cost of the controller chips.

The Promise IDE RAID controller.

Overall, the 6A815EPD has a lot of promise, but comes out as an average dual Socket-370 motherboard, mainly due to its inability to overclock. The chipset's memory limitations don't help the situation any, although there is no doubt that the 815EP chipset is faster than the other options in this roundup. If you don't plan to overclock and don't need more than 512MB of memory, then the Acorp 6A815EPD is an excellent choice.