EPoX 5NVA+ SLI is the first board that we tested based on the new NVIDIA nForce4 SLi Intel Edition (C19) + MCP04. This new chipset supports the Intel FSB 1066 processors with EMT64. DDR2-667 is supported for future CPUs that could run at sync with memory at such high speeds of 333MHz (DDR2-667).  It also supports a single 16 x PCIe slot or Dual PCIe x 8. The board' also support 8ch audio, 10 USB2.0, PCI-Ex1 / GbE LAN, 4 SATA II RAID and 1394, ActiveArmour and NV Firewall. These features makes it the a good alternative to the expensive i955X boards.

Just like the NF4 boards from EPoX, the 5NVA+SLI comes with goodies in the package itself. Rounded cables, screw drivers, heatsink for mosfets are not normally packaged for most boards. This is a plus for EPoX series of boards.  On top of these, the board BIOS also comes with Magic Health which shows temps at boot, EZboot for easy boot up from device and PowerBIOS for overclockers to tweak fsb, chipset, memory etc. The board also comes with 80 Debug Port, Quick SPDIF a onboard SPDIF out connector for quick connection to multi channel speakers. The EZ Button is a handy poweron button located on mainboard for easy turn on /off system, The LEDION is Onboard LED to show the power status CPU, Chipset and DRAM. The package also provides a thermo stick for monitoring temperature of devices like VGA card. SP-ATA is also provided, it is a SATA to IDE conversion device for plugging older IDE devices to SATA ports.

The board is tested under Windows XP 64 bits. Performance wise, the board does well with one core recognised. I still do not understand why NVIDIA has yet to fix the problem of 820D not recognised as a dual core processor even with the latest BIOS and drivers. This has an impact of the results as shown in the benchmarks when multithreaded benchmarks were used to test the system. In fact, you would have noticed that we didn't include the SLI results as we were experiencing hangs in 3Dmark03/05 tests. DOOM3 seems OK. Using a single core, the performance is no par with the 955X boards running at the same clk and ram speed.

The board has abundant overclocking features with adjustments of the voltage and clk range. You can check the gallery for more details. In our tests, we can o/c the board to 220MHz FSB x 14 with RAM running at ASync DDR2-528.

Overall, the board runs pretty well and EPoX's packaging has made this board very appealing. The only disappointment is probably NVidia's 820D support which could be the cause of the SLI problem. In fact, this is not only on EPoX's but on all brands. It is just that the chipset does not support it. Lets hope NVIDIA can get this resolved as soon as possible. Any updates will be appended here when available.

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Pros

• 1394a
• 10 USB 2.0
• 4 SATA II NVRAID ports
• LEDION Onboard LED

Cons

• 820D dual core compatibility issue
• No Wi-Fi

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10 stars.