Epox SLI opinion please

[imported_situman]

Hi,

Thinking about getting the Epox SLI. But no one seems to have this board or talks about it much. Can anyone give an opinion on this board? Stability, overclockability, quality and stuff like that. Although the placement of the power connectors is PITA, I guess nothing's really perfect in this world.

 

[SniperWulf]

are you speaking of their 754 or 939 board?

 

[imported_situman]

sorry 939.

 

[SniperWulf]

aahh... I just ordered the 754 version this morning

 

[DBL]

Got it last Friday with a X2 3800+ and 2GB of cheap Mwave ram. It was a relatively easy setup once I flashed the BIOS to recognize the X2 Chip. OC was easy enough. Currently, I have just upped the FSB to 235, so I'm running 2350 w/o issues. I backed it down from 240 this morning b/c I think it rebooted during the night. I have not played around with any of the other settings yet. I just really wanted to get a simple easy OC and leave it at that. Right now, it's got 4600+ performance for the most part.

I think I have 2 issues that I ran into.
1) I wasn't really planning on running raid but I have not been able to get into the NVIDIA ATA RAID bios. The instructions say to hit a certain key (F10), which I have done but all I see when booting is "searching for RAID array. I have 1 72GB Raptor for a boot and 2 320 WD for Storage, so I could conceivably RAID 0 the WD drives, although I'm not sure that makes much sense.

2) During the 1st XP Pro install, I lost my boot drive after installing some initial software. I think it was due to the NFORCE IDE drivers and had no problem after re-installing and skipping these drivers the second time.

In general, I?ve seen huge performance gains most likely due to the fact that I've been using a 1.2 Thunderbird OC to 1.4 for the last 4 years. IMO, the Epox board seems to be a good value.

 

[Doug117]

DBL for your RAID make sure you have set the drives you want to be in RAID under Integrated Peripherals -> IDE Function Setup. Enable "RAID Enable" and then enable the SATA/PATA ports you want to allow access to the RAID. dont hit F10 till u see that screen, should pop right into it with no wait.

 

[DBL]

Originally posted by: Doug117
DBL for your RAID make sure you have set the drives you want to be in RAID under Integrated Peripherals -> IDE Function Setup. Enable "RAID Enable" and then enable the SATA/PATA ports you want to allow access to the RAID. dont hit F10 till u see that screen, should pop right into it with no wait.

Thanks, I'll take a look at that tonight. I guess you don't need those nForce IDE drivers to enable RAID then? I was beginning to think that is why I was unable to enter the RAID bios. I'd certainly prefer not to install those again considering I think they hosed my system the first time.

Do you think I might need to up the CPU voltage to gain some more stability at 2.4GHz and beyond?