Print this article

EPoX 4T2A Pentium4 Motherboard


Date
: 08/26/01 – 08:28:10 PM

Author
:

Category
: Motherboard

Page 1 : Introduction

Manufacturer: EPoX
Price: $210

Introduction

A while ago we’ve taken a look at the only tweakable motherboard available for the Intel Pentium 4 at that time: the Abit TH7. Although there were no problems what so ever with the TH7, it was still a bad situation that there was only one tweakable P4 board around.

A few weeks ago, EPoX announced a Pentium 4 motherboard as well: the 4T2A. Although EPoX doesn’t carry the same overclockers bag as Abit, they have quickly become one of my favorite motherboard manufacturers because of their high quality and very stable motherboards like the 8KTA3+ for example. Lately EPoX has been introducing many tweaks and overclocking settings on their boards, and the 4T2A is one of those boards. O has put the board through several stress tests and after days of torturing we bring you an in-depth view on the EP-4T2A.

Page 2 : Package

In Da Box

Nothing out of the ordinary here …

- EPoX 4T2A motherboard
- 2 IDE cables
- 1 floppy cable
- 2 RDRAM dummies
- Cd-rom with drivers, software, …
- USB bracket
- Norton Ghost
- Norton Anti-Virus



Everything you need to install the motherboard is included, nothing more nothing less. EPoX also includes the USB bracket which gives you two extra USB ports. I am happy to see that they include it as most manufacturers do not …

Something to watch out for when installing a P4 board are Intel’s 850 drivers. These have to be installed right after Windows was installed … don’t install other drivers before you install these because otherwise you will get a performance drop for sure!

Of course, EPoX includes the RDRAM dummies which are needed in case you only use 2 memory sticks. The dummies are made by Apacer and are plain green :). In case you didn’t know, memory has to be used in pairs when using RDRAM. So 2x64MB or 2x256MB or whatever will go, but not 1x128MB or 1x64MB and 1x256MB … Just like is was back in the days of EDO ram.

Page 3 : Specifications

Specifications

To start of, lets look at EPoX’ speclist shall we?

- Supports Socket 423 Processors.
Intel Pentium 4
-Intel 850 AGPset.
-Winbond Super Multi I/O Controller.
1 Floppy drive controller,
1 Parallel port (EPP, ECP),
2 Serial ports.
-USB
2 supported onboard.
4 support max (optional).
-Award PnP BIOS. Flash upgradeable.
120MB ATAPI floppy drive and ZIP support!
-Standard ATX form factor.
305mm x 245mm
-UltraDMA EIDE Controllers.
PCI Bus IDE Port/UDMA100 x 2 (Up to 4 Devices)
-400MHz Front Side Bus.
-4x RIMM Slots for RAMBUS PC600/PC800.
2GB max. supported.
-PS/2 connectors.
1 PS/2 mouse,
1 PS/2 keyboard.
-5 (32-bit) PCI, 1 CNR, & 1 AGP.
AGP supports 1x, 2x, and 4x modes.
-C-Media CMI8738/PCI-SX PCI sound chip
-Supports exclusive USDM(Unified System Diagnostic Manager) and Hardware Monitoring

Function by W83627HF-AW
Supports exclusive KBPO(Keyboard Power ON)
Supports STR (Suspend To RAM) power saving Function
Supports CPU Vcore and Clock Setting
Supports Wake-On-LAN Function

Just like most motherboards currently available for the Intel Pentium 4, the EPoX 4T2A uses the Intel i850 chipset, which means that it supports the socket423 package (the chipset will also be seen on socket478 boards), has support up to 2GB RDRAM running at 400MHz and comes with more than enough expansion slots.

The 4T2A is equiped with one AGP slot, 5 PCI slots and a CNR slot. Although this is a good configuration, I would rather have 6 PCI slots and no CNR slot at all, since almost noone has a real use for it. The board comes with 2 USB ports and can be upgraded to a total of 4 USB ports with the use of an optional USB bracket.

Like you can tell from the speclist, EPoX’ new P4 board has no out of the ordinary layout … actually it comes pretty close to Intel’s reference board. Is this a bad thing? Not really, but it does mean you won’t see ‘cool’ features like onboard RAID, an diagnosting LED or 6 PCI slots on the board. In a way this is a bit disappointing since the 4T2A has too many tweakable options to be a true OEM board, but it lacks several options to be a hardcore tweakable board like the TH7. The overall layout is actually very good as all connections for hard drives, floppy drives, power, … are situated on the right side of the board. The only wire that will go over the motherboard is the small 12v power cable, but that one shouldn’t interfear with the airflow too much.

Since there is no onboard RAID, you will have to do with the two onboard IDE channels for a total of 4 IDE devices. The other default ports are around as well: two serial ports, a parallell port, PS/2 for the mouse and PS/2 for the keyboard.

Like most EPoX boards, the 4T2A features the C-Media CMI8738 onboard sound processor. Just like other onboard solutions, the CMI8738 performs good but nothing out of the ordinary. It will do just fine for Windows sounds and a casual audio cd or mp3 file but don’t expect high-end sound when you play a round of Max Payne or if you watch The Matrix for the 104th time …

I won’t go into detail about the P4 architecture or the RDRAM specifications, since I already did that in the Abit TH7 review. So I suggest you check out that review for all the details. The 4T2A supports all available socket423 Pentium 4 processors, starting at 1.3GHz all the way up to the soon to be released 2.0GHz version. Do note that with the 2.0GHz release, we have seen the last socket423 cpu as Intel is switching to the socket478 package after that.



EPoX installed several tweakable settings on the 4T2A: you can adjust the core voltage, change the multiplier (as if that will do any good with locked Intel processors ;)), change the FSB, … Actually you can use the following FSB settings: 100, 103, 105, 108, 110, 115, 118, 120, 122, 125 and 133. Although 1MHz increments are not available, the settings are spread over a wide range so you will find what you need. The most important settings are from 103 to 110. Why? Well, unless you have an unlocked P4 (which is very unlikely), your processor will be locked at a certain multiplier. The Pentium 4 uses very high multipliers so the smallest increase in FSB will result in a pretty high core speed increase. That is why settings above 110 MHz won’t be used a lot … most cpu’s won’t be stable when overclocked that high.



In order to achieve more stability during your overclocking adventure, you can try to up the voltage. Note that voltage increase, also means that more heat will be pumped out of the cpu so make sure your heatsink can handle the load. The cpu core voltage can be increased or decreased by 0.025v, which unfortunately is not enough in my humble opinion. Both the RDRAM and the AGP voltage can be increased by 0.1v but again, for the powerusers out there, these
numbers are a joke.

Besides the above settings, the BIOS offers nothing special and uses the well known look we have seen on all the other EPoX boards (and other boards as well). Of course you can also monitor all the temperatures, fan speeds, voltages, …

Enough about the specifications, lets take a look at the installation process.

Page 4 : Installation

Installation

Installing the EPoX 4T2A is pretty easy. The first P4 board I tested (made by Intel) required a special case that featured a weird looking platform where the cpu would be located. Those motherboards also came with a metal plate on the backside of the motherboard.

Today’s motherboards look just like a normal motherboard … The only necessity is a ‘P4 Ready’ powersupply because P4 motherboards require three powerconnectors: the normal ATX one, a secondary 12v line (looks like a 4-pin ATX connextor) and an additional 6-pin powerconnector.

Makes you wonder how much power the P4 and its motherboard require heh?

Once the motherboard is bolted securely to the case chassis, you just insert the Pentium 4 into the socket and close the lever to secure it. To install the heatsink, two levers must be lifted.

Then you put the heatsink onto the cpu and close both levers at the same time. I really like this system as it requires no tools at all and the heatsinks sits really tight onto the processor. What more can you ask for? Ok we are all set and ready to rumble! On to the overclocking!

Page 5 : Overclocking

Overclocking

Like I mentioned before, the 4T2A offers some overclocking potential, but the board is far from being the overclockers dream. This is not a real issue since real overclockers won’t buy a Pentium 4 anyway. Why? Because AMD makes it a lot easier to overclock and is cheaper as well.

So the only overclocking you will be pulling is by the use of the FSB, which also means that the other devices like the PCI cards and the memory will be overclocked. Because the P4 uses a quadpump memory bus, a 10MHz increase in the FSB results in a memory speed increase of 40MHz! Reaching a front side bus of 133MHz is totally out of the question with current memory sticks, which explains why only the FSB options below 115MHz are interesting.



Our P4 1.4GHz testunit ran stable up to 1610MHz, which means we reached a FSB of 115MHz before stability problems occured. We got identical results on the Abit TH7, which clearly shows that a P4 1.4GHz reaches its limits around 1.6GHz.



Now lets see how the EPoX 4T2A ends up in the benchmarks shall we?

Page 6 : Benchmarking

Benchmarking

In order to get an idea of the power of the 4T2A, we compared all results to the ones we got on the TH7 which we reviewed some time ago. It will be interesting to see how both manufacturers managed to get the most out of the 850 chipset, so sit back and enjoy the ride!

Here is the setup we used:

- EPoX 4T2A P4 motherboard
- Intel P4 1.4GHz
- 2x64MB PC800 RDRAM
- VisionTek GeForce 3
- Western Digital 20GB 7200rpm UDMA100
- Accton NIC
- Windows 2000 + SP2 + Detonator 12.90 + Intel 850 drivers

ZDnet Benchmarks

CPU Mark

FPU Mark

Distributed.Net RC5 Benchmark

Short RC5 Benchmark

In the ZDnet benchmarks and the RC5 test, both the TH7 and the 4T2A are performing very much alike … Pretty normal if you come to think of it because both boards are using the same chipset, cpu, video card, … everything. The TH7 takes a small advantage, but nothing you would notice in real life applications. The reason why the Athlon is so much faster in RC5 is because the P4 core is not yet recognized by the RC5 client …

On to the Quake3 and 3D Mark 2001 results to see what these boards mean in the gaming world!

Page 7 : Sisoft Bench Suite

Sisoft Sandra Benchmark Suite

CPU Benchmark

Multimedia CPU Benchmark

Memory Benchmark

History repeats itself … Both motherboards perform equal since these test depend a lot on the processor power, and since both cpu’s are equal the results are very close to each other as well. Just look at those memory scores … don’t you love RDRAM ;). If you wonder why the TH7 gets higher memory scores, that’s because the 1.6GHz on the TH7 was reached by upping the FSB whereas the 4T2A was benchmarked with a true 1.6GHz processor. The AMD 1.4GHz system, which uses DDR memory, performs well but it can’t touch the RDRAM memory scores at all … the question is, will this be a problem in real life appz? Doubt it …

Page 8 : Quake 3 & 3D Mark 2001

Quake3 Benchmark

Q3 Demo001

Q3 Torture Demo

Quake 3 is still one of the best 3D shoot’em up games out there, and with that said it is also a very good tool to benchmark a computer component to see how it would pull through a high-end gaming environment. The Pentium 4 is the ideal cpu for this game, as the benchmarks show …

MadOnion 3D Mark 2001

16-Bit

32-Bit

MadOnion, leader in the 3D benchmarks, has proven to be another great way to test the 3D performance. We ran 3D Mark 2001 on both motherboards and the results speak for themselves.

Page 9 : Conclusion

Conclusion

EPoX did an excellent job on the 4T2A, but they did make it a bit hard to find the right market for the board: it comes with too many features and tweaks to be classified as an OEM motherboard, intended for use in office computers and the board lacks several things to be a true poweruser board with offerings like onboard RAID, diagnostic LED, more voltage options, …

Does this mean that the 4T2A is a bad buy? Not at all! The board performed very good in all tests and never showed a sign of instability or problems. In fact, I wouldn’t hesitate to use this board in my own rig. Just be aware of the fact that it doesn’t come with all the features that the TH7 carries along … you don’t mind? Then this is the P4 board you want to buy! Also note that EPoX includes both Norton Ghost and Norton Anti-Virus full version into the package!

Good

- Very stable motherboard
- Good layout
- Nice software bundle

Bad

- Not enough tweaks (voltage and overclocking)
- P4 will be moving to socket478 so this board will become obsolete :(