Epox 3SPA3 Review - PAGE 1

Introduction

Sadly, the era of the BX chipset is coming to a close; after more than 2 years of adoration, it’s time for us to put it to rest, and to move on to newer and better things. While there is no doubt that new chipsets will come along, finding one that matches or even exceeds the expectations of our friend the BX may prove to be difficult.

Horizontal View of the EP-3SPA3

After much confusion and controversy, it appears as though the powers that be have chosen Intel’s i815 Chipset to follow in the BX’s footsteps. This is mainly due to RDRAM (or Rambus), the ridiculously expensive form of “next generation” memory technology that Intel is attempting to force on their customers. The very unsuccessful i820 chipset features this type of RAM and it’s probably safe to assume that this fact alone killed the i820’s chances of being the BX’s successor. Because of all the controversy, Intel also released an SDRAM-based version of the i820, but in order to make the SDRAM work they were forced to implement a buggy hack dubbed the “Memory Translator Hub” (MTH). Needless to say, the MTH was a disaster . (The i840 chipset also uses RDRAM but it is aimed at the power-hungry workstation/server markets where the high price is more justified.)

Another possible contender for a BX successor would have been the i830 if the project hadn’t been recently scrapped. The most likely reason for the canning is the fact that the i830 was poised to perform even better than the i815, bringing it very close to the performance of the i820 and i840 chipsets. This would have made it difficult for Intel to justify the high cost of these RDRAM-based solutions when a much cheaper solution existed. The result is an artificial constraint on the performance of Intel’s non-RDRAM chipsets, most notably the i815. “Artificial” because in some ways, the i815(E/EP) has taken a step backwards from the BX, which I will explain in a moment.

The Epox 3SPA3 is equipped with a newer version of the i815 chipset, referred to as the i815EP (Intel sure loves adding letters onto their product codes, don’t they?). Before this version came the i815E which introduced a second USB controller as well as support for ATA 100. The major difference with the i815EP is the removal of the on-board video (hallelujah!) which both the original i815 and i815E feature.

The 3SPA3 is very much aimed at the overclocking market, as can be seen by the specs below:

CPU Interface Socket 370 Chipset Intel i815EP FSB Speeds 66MHz - 255MHz in 1MHz steps Clock Multiples 3 - 8 in 0.5 steps Core Voltages 1.65V - 1.95V in 0.05V steps I/O Voltages 3.45V - 3.65V in 0.05V steps RAM 3 - 168-pin DIMM slots (PC100/PC133 - 512MB max) Expansion 1AGP (4x), 5PCI, 1CNR, and 4USB (2 onboard, 2 optional) PCI IDE 2 ATA100 IDE channels (up to four devices) Other Onboard audio, Award BIOS, POSTMAN debugging, CPU throttling