Athlon 64 X2 - Is EPoX EP-9NPA+ Mainboard Good?

ixoy

So I'm seriously thinking of Komplett's 64 X2 offer (here):

* AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ 2.2GHz Socket 939, 1MB, BOXED w/fan (info)

* EPoX EP-9NPA+ SLI,nForce4 SLI,Socket-939 ,ATX,S-ATA2,GbLAN,Firewire,DDR, PCI-Ex16 (info)

* Corsair Value S. PC3200 DDR-DIMM 1024MB Kit w/two matched Value Select 512MB (info)

It seems to pretty much match exactly what I need. I'm just a bit confuddled over the large range of mainboards. Obviously I can distinguish the bare needs such as USB ports, PCI-E slots, etc but beyond that is there any one that's better over the other? Is the upgrade kit one a good buy? The specifications say it's compatible for the Athlon 64 and Athlon 64 FX - is the 64 FX the same as the X2 for compatibilities with mainboards?

Second question is a quick one on ATA - there's 4 slots available. Is this the same as IDE? WOuld my old DVD/R-W work on this? Surely it would. And is S-ATA II not just a newer version of S-ATA so that my old S-ATA drive would work there too?

Final question, and this is more hypothetical - is it likely this board and chip will be redundant when AMD launch their next round of chips for DDR2 RAM?

Thanks all in advance!

DemonOfTheFall

That board and chip will definitely both be made redundant when they launch socket AM2 in summer. Shouldn't matter too much though, they won't be offering much of a performance gain.

You're right about ATA, its the exact same as IDE, different name.

SATA2 is backwards compatible to SATA, no need to worry there either.

It might be worth your while to avoid the Epox board. I've worked with 5 of them, since they're such good value. In general I'd say they're a little bit of hassle to get up and running, but when they are running they're rock solid.

cerbeus

I have one and it works just fine.

But beware this is a PCI Express board and the graphics card is PCI x16 so if you are upgrading you'll need a PCI express graphics card! :eek:

ixoy

Why is the graphics card restricted to the PCI-E x 16 slot? There's two other PCI-E slots on the mainboard too when the full specs are examined. Surely the card can go in any of those?

Canis Lupus

ixoy wrote:

Why is the graphics card restricted to the PCI-E x 16 slot? There's two other PCI-E slots on the mainboard too when the full specs are examined. Surely the card can go in any of those?

Who with the what?

That board is SLI meaning it has two ports for 2 GFX cards on it.

So you have two cards running at *8

Or

One card running at *16

The other slots are normal PCI slots.

DemonOfTheFall

Theres also a PCI-E x1 slot by the looks of it. I don't see why you couldn't put a graphics card in that slot.... Just I don't see why you'd want to either. Why intentionally cripple your performance ?