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The BIOS is your usual AWARD fare with suppport for booting off all manner of devices although unlike AMI BIOS' that let a SCSI card initialise so you can pick all your SCSI boot devices, AWARD BIOS's don't, giving you a single, all emcompassing 'SCSI' selection in the boot order menus. A small point that wont affect many but being a SCSI user it's worth pointing out.
I mentioned in the introduction that the board was targetted at the enthusiast and it's in the BIOS where all such action takes place. With excellent support for tweaking memory timings and more importantly excellent voltage adjustment for I/O, AGP, DIMM and CPU. The ranges are also excellent with up to 3.2V on the memory and 1.85V selectable with a Northwood processor. While it's not recommended that you use more than 1.75V for extended running on a Northwood CPU, the option is there. EPoX, with their Socket A AMD offerings, are reknowned for producing boards with excellent voltage range and they carry this to the 4G4A+.
Bundle wise, the EPoX excels. Presentation as a whole is excellent with a metallic pink/purple coloured box with a slide out container for the motherboard and extra's. Quite different from anything this reviewer has seen before and something definitely designed to attract the eye of the casual consumer. Whether motherboard marketing works that way remains to be seen but it's certainly a change from your usual box.
You get the manual, I/O shield, extra pair of USB ports for the backplane of your case and the board itself. The CD supplied is usual EPoX standard and the menu interface to the CD detects and offers up for installation everything that you need to get your board up and running.
Manual wise, it matches the box in terms of colour and the content is well translated and easy to follow. Important information is easy to find and while it's not Tolstoi and perfect bed side reading, it's all a computer reference manual should be. Top marks for presentation and manual for EPoX.
It's worth noting that EPoX didn't supply a DVI riser for the Intel Extreme core but it's no great loss given the pathetic performance of the onboard graphics.
Let's take a look at system setup before looking at performance.
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