Several months ago we reviewed for the first time a dual AMD motherboard. In the meantime Intel gained a lot of respect with the new Pentium 4 processors, but the low price AMD MP processor is still an attractive solution for the server market. Many network administrators associate the AMD name with instabilities and heat. Although this is half true, at least from the historical point of view, we have to give a chance to AMD servers. As a fan of Intel network solutions and as a man working with servers for more than six hours a day I think that I can judge in an objective way the performance and stability of the AMD platform. Maybe that CrackMaster would have provided a more detailed review of the Epox board I will test today but he preferred to let me write this article due to my experience with servers.

What to expect

The Epox M762A is based on AMD 762 chipset and is targeted to server market. For more details about the AMD 762 architecture I suggest you to read these facts. Of course that you can use a dual AMD motherboard to play games, but instead of two CPUs for entertainment activities it’s recommended a single, faster CPU. The M762A product packaging is quite usual for a low cost server board: two IDE ribbon cables, one floppy cable, one USB bracket, one user’s manual and one CD with drivers. You will not find detailed info on M762A's manual because the mobo is targeted to a special segment of the market. The board in the package is a 1.1 revision. M762A has five PCI slots (three 32bits, two 64 bits), one AGP slot and four DIMM slots. In this review I will describe mainly the issues which are relevant to our article theme. When looking for a server board, several aspects are important and have to be considered. Quite often I am interested about the IDE RAID onboard support (for SCSI RAID I recommend you an external card, it’s a much better solution), headers placement and Ethernet ports. Our card had onboard only an Intel 82559 network chip, no other features like RAID or video. The extra set of onboard capabilities and the headers' placement is quite important if you plan to put the board in a rack mountable chassis. For other kind of cases, these are not very important.

Epox M762A product picture

Overall, the board has a decent design, with enough space for large coolers. Remember that you have to look for boards able to accept large base coolers, especially if you want to use the board in a low profile case. The DIMM memory slots are perpendicular to the board, not angled, but that’s not really a problem because you have to have a lot of guts to try installing a dual AMD platform in a 1U chassis. Fortunately the board didn’t come with onboard sound; you won’t need it in a server. There is only one important jumper on board, the one that allows to set the FSB between 100Mhz and 133Mhz.