A good many motherboards are shipping with complete software bundles of games, productivity apps, and anti-virus software. Along with the Epox 5EGA+ comes a copy of Norton Personal Firewall 2003, and Trend PC-cillin 2004. When it comes time to update the boards BIOS, Epox's handy 'Magic FLASH' Windows BIOS flashing utility will make the process go a lot smoother.

Overclocking!

In the eyes of PCstats, Epox has a great reputation for overclockability, and were hoping the 5EGA+ would meet our expectations. Starting at 200 MHz FSB, we slowly raised the clock speed of the motherboard to 213 MHz. At that FSB, a voltage increase to the memory (to 2.8V) was necessary. Continuing onward, the board and Intel Pentium 540 CPU just hit the wall at 220 MHz FSB. Anything above that would generate a "C1" error on the Port 80 card, which indicates memory problems. Raising the memory voltage all the way up to 3.3V didn't solve this, and I'm not sure exactly what was holding the Epox 5EGA+ back.

The Pretty BIOS

Here in the Advanced Chipset Features, the Epox 5EGA+ has all the BIOS options we'd expect from a high end motherboard. This includes CAS Latency, RAS to CAS an RAS Precharge.

In the 'Power BIOS' area users can adjust the FSB from 200-350 MHz, in 1 MHz increments. The memory frequency can be set to run 1:1 or 6:5. The maximum CPU voltage is 1.6V, while maximum DDR voltage is 3.3V. I would have liked to see adjustable Northbridge voltage options as well, perhaps Epox can include that in future BIOS revisions?