EPoX, a company with products ranging from Bluetooth connectivity to motherboards, to small-form factor PCs, and a few more in between, lately announced the 4PDA5+. Based on the Intel i865PE Northbridge and an ICH4 Southbridge, it seems a bit unusual.

Specifications

• CPU: Socket 478 Pentium 4 (Prescott and Northwood)
• Chipset: Intel 865PE Northbridge and ICH4 Southbridge
• Form Factor and Size: ATX (305mm x 245mm)
• Memory: Supports up to 4GB in DDR266/333/400 speeds
• BIOS: Award BIOS, ACPI 2 compliant
• AGP: 4x and 8x supported
• PCI slots: 5
• Ethernet: Onboard gigabit Ethernet
• Audio: Eight channel
• IDE Controller: Supports ATA-100
• SATA Controller: Supports RAID 0, 1, 10, 5
• USB ports: 6 USB 2.0 ports, 4 on rear panel, 2 available by pin header

See the missing IEEE 1394, or FireWire support. FireWire support is useful for anybody who uses a digital video camera, due to its high transfer rates. Owners of digital cameras would like to consider this motherboard carefully, because the only technique to include FireWire support is to buy an expansion card that fits in the PCI slot. That said the board also has four USB ports in the back, which permits people who have a USB keyboard and USB mouse, and still have room for other stationary USB devices, such as a USB printer.

Keep in mind what I said about the motherboard being a bit unusual? That is because the ICH4 Southbridge is older than the ICH5R normally found on newer motherboards. This is possibly a cost-cutting measure to continue the board more reasonable, since I doubt that EPoX had lots of ICH4s remaining after the creation of the 4PDA2+, which is based on the ICH5R.

While it seems that I am harping on the inclusion of the ICH4, do not sweat too much if you are upgrading. The i865PE supports Northwood-based Pentium 4s, Celerons with NetBurst, and Prescott-based Intel chips, while the 4PDA5+ supports CPUs with transfer rates of 400, 533, and 800 MHz. Enthusiasts will be very probing to see how well this motherboard performs. Remember that the ICH4 supports everything that the ICH5R does, except fixed support for Serial ATA with or without RAID, and support for eight USB 2.0 ports. The ICH4 can only handle 6 USB ports.

Having said all of that, EPoX got around some of the limitations of the ICH4 by connecting some marginal to it. The Marvell 88E8001 gigabit Ethernet controller and the Silicon Image Sil3114 SATA RAID controller are connected to the ICH4 through the PCI bus, with the Win-bond W83627THF legacy I/O controller to handle devices for example parallel port, the floppy drive, and the 2 PS/2 ports used for the mouse and keyboard. In fact, the only thing that the Springdale Northbridge is doing is handling the AGP 8X slot and the memory.

Develop the i865PE chipset is support for DDR400 in a dual channel configuration. In motherboards based on Intel chips, this is common, and requires in order maximizing memory bandwidth. You are permitted up to 4 GB of RAM, ample for most tasks and leaving a lot of upgrade room.