EPoX EP-8U1697-GLI Motherboard - Open the box

I must declare that the full time I was doing the review on this motherboard; I had a feeling of déjà vu. When I first opened the box and pulled out the board, I was immediately struck by the similarities to the last one I reviewed. At first quick look, it seems they still have the two oddities which type of bothered me about the last board. First, the number of jumpers that want to be switched to configure your PCIe settings can be a bit daunting. It is nice, though, that these should not require to be changed randomly.

When mounted in most cases, the direct line between the ATX power cable coming from the PSU and the power socket on the board is blocked by the CPU itself. This means that in most cases, you want to route the power cables around the CPU and whatever CPU fan or cooler you have. This can be difficult, to say the least.

The motherboard would be not anything without the socket 754 connector. It is placed in its regular spot on the board, and is bordered by a three phase power circuit. The mounting frame is quite robust, and even has a brace on the back of the motherboard to give extra support for large CPU fans and coolers. As with the 9U1697, note the odd position of the ATX and 12V power sockets. These situate the CPU directly in the way of the power cables.

On this board, the two (eyes, only two) SDRAM slots run along the edge of the board above the CPU instead of to the right of it as in most configurations. These two slots can contain a maximum of 2GB of RAM, and sadly do not support dual channel operation.

Along the back of the board, the 2 IDE connectors are placed together and close to the top of the board. This is an accurate position, as it makes it simple to connect to the IDE components which are traditionally situated at this end of the motherboard. Past the two yellow IDE connectors are the four orange SATA connectors. These SATA ports support up to 300MB/s bandwidth, and a different range of RAID configurations.

Continuing in the same direction, we have the push buttons for RESET and POWER. These buttons are very useful if you have the computer on a workbench, and require testing power on/off and resetting conditions without having to reach around to the front of the case to do so. After that to these buttons is the CP80P LED, which is a trouble shooting device designed to help diagnose problems while booting up.

Right next to the SATA connectors is the silver heat-sink that covers the ULi chipset. The 9U1697 sported a heat-sink and a fan on its 1697, but it seems the 8U1697 opted for the heat-sink only. I just hope it keeps the chipset cool sufficient for stable operation.

Here is the back panel itself. Here you see keyboard, mouse, parallel, serial, USB, LAN, sound, spdif; basically the same stuff you see on most motherboards these days.

Inside the box, we have the normal array of goodies:

• The Motherboard (of course)
• Drivers and Software CD
• Motherboard Manual
• Floppy and IDE Cables
• I/O backplate
• SATA power and data cables (one each)

The best thing about the contents of this box in comparison to the contents of the 9U1697 when we got it is that it adds an actual manual for the board. This takes the estimation out of some of the pin-outs for the leads.