In the last months the AMD chipsets market didn’t experience any spectacular change. One of the causes was that manufacturers were limited by the technical specifications of the current line of Athlon CPUs. It's possible to improve chipsets, but the performance gain is minimal and most manufacturers were not tempted to invest. Future AMD processors will need new chips so that the trend is to develop new chipsets and to minimally improve current products. Following this philosophy, nVidia released a new chipset called nForce2 Ultra. This is a slightly modified version of nForce2 that is supposed to add the official support for Athlon 400Mhz CPUs (Barton core). The first nForce2 was also able to work with 400Mhz processors and nVidia claimed this in the past, but with the Ultra version they want to point out that they've got the Barton support.
The mainboard tested today is based on nForce2 Ultra and comes from Epox. Epox 8RDA3+ is a new motherboard targeted to users who want performance and features.

First look

The motherboard is shipped in standard box, together with the user’s manual, several short guides, one CD, one floppy disk containing the SATA drivers, two SATA cables with power cable adapters, one IEE1394 bracket, two rounded IDE cables, one floppy cable, one serial ports bracket and one ATX shield. The package is one of the most complete ever seen and shows Epox' concern for quality. The user’s manual is well written. It describes the motherboard's installation process and provides additional information for advanced users. The motherboard is based on a 5 PCI / 1 AGP / 3 DDR slots design. The board's layout is nice, although there are a lot of onboard devices. Both chips that compose the nForce 2 chipset are passively cooled by two aluminum heatsinks.

8RDA3+ has two LAN ports, SATA, audio and IEEE1394 capabilities. There are six USB 2.0 ports available, four on the board's rear and two on bracket. All the functions require additional hardware parts, but the physical space is limited. In order to implement these features Epox had to make several sacrifices. There is plenty of space around the CPU socket to accommodate large heatsinks, but the motherboard suffers from the infamous DIMM insertion problems. Between the AGP slot and the first PCI slot Epox placed the RealTek RTL8101L LAN controller. They chose this position for the LAN controller because the AGP slot had to be placed several centimeters away from the first PCI slot due to the South bridge's position. The extra headers are placed near the edge of the motherboard in a quite inaccessible position, especially if you have PCI cards in PCI slots four or five. I was not very happy with the ATX power headers position, but I must mention that nForce2 requires more space around the DIMM slots due to the memory traces. Near the CPU there are two FAN headers and another header is placed near the edge of the motherboard. Like most Epox mobos, 8RDA3+ comes with onboard diagnostic features. The error codes are displayed in hexadecimal format on two LED with seven segments.

7 segments LED Diagnostic Features

In order to provide the additional features 8RDA3+ uses the Silicon Image Sil3112ACT144 SATA controller and the Agere FW323-06 IEEE1394 controller.

Silicon Image SATA controller

Take a look to the motherboard's picture below:

The motherboard has only two jumpers onboard, the CMOS clear and the FSB select jumper. Near the audio ports there is a Front Panel connector which permits the audio ports translation to the frontal part of the case. This connector can be seen on most boards that use the Cmedia CMI9739A audio codec.