The motherboard is out of the box, the after that thing to do is get it prepared for installation. In this case, I have get an AMD Athlon 64 3000+ for this board.

Installation of the board into the computer was pretty straightforward. Fasten the board into place, plug in a few wires, and voila. Once adding a hard drive, CD ROM, and a video card, the machine is actually ready to boot.

As with other motherboards in their line, EPoX has bundled some useful utilities with the 8U1697. Ghost Bios allows you to back up and after that restore the bios for your machine. If you get a catastrophic error and lose your bios, you can simply restore saved bios, or get the newest one from the Internet.

Thunder-probe is a hardware diagnostic program, designed to give you insight into the heath of your computer hardware. Available in the flashy interface are variables such as bus speed, CPU core voltage, CPU temp, fan speeds, and much more. You can even set alerts and have the software notify you if your computer steps outside of your predefined parameters. Here is a shot of what it looks like:

EPoX EP-8U1697-GLI Motherboard - Up and running

Once I had the machine up and running, I decided to see what I could do to make it perform. EPoX has a history of making over-clocking-friendly motherboards, and this one is no exception.

Here’s my test configuration:

• EPoX 8U1697 Motherboard
• AMD 64 3000+ Venice
• 2GB Patriot PC4000 memory
• Sapphire X800 PCIe

My CPU, at stock, runs at 2000 MHz. By using the over-clocking abilities of the 8U1697, I was capable to slowly increase the FSB from 200 up to 250 MHz, with only a small step up in the core CPU when at about 240 MHz. In soul, I was able to push this CPU to 2.52 GHz with stock cooling. That is an awesome over-clock for stock cooling. With more effective cooling in place, I am sure I could have gotten it even faster (maybe 2.8 GHz). Yeah, the Venice is quite over-clockable, but the outstanding features of the 8U1697 made it possible to over-clock very effectively.

For my testing, I used the following benchmarks:

• 3dmark05
• 3dmark03
• Half Life 2
• Doom 3

I did all of the tests against the board and CPU at stock settings, and after that again over-clocked at 2.53GHz. Here are my results:

Just like its socket 939 brother, this board really shines when using it for over-clocking. We got a respectable increase in overall performance when over-clocking the system using the powerful bios.