The nVIDIA GeForce 6100 series of chipsets have spawned a very popular class of motherboards, and for good reason. The Geforce 6100 offers up great performance, a ton of integrated features, and comes at a very low cost. Up until now most GeForce 6100 based motherboards have been the more compact MicroATX formfactor, so it is nice to see Epox release this platform which has a few more expansion slots.

The Epox EP-AF550G Pro makes a great platform build an office oriented PC from; the onboard Geforce 6100 videocard is more than satisfactory for tasks like word processing, spreadsheets, email, web surfing and the like.

With a retail price of $105 CDN ($90 US, £45 GBP), there are few items included in the box. What the Epox EP-AF550G Pro motherboard does offer in the way of extras is built onboard; video which supports high definition acceleration, 5.1 channel audio controller, Gigabit networking, a Port card, and SATA II RAID. That's pretty much everything you really need for a workstation environment... Let's not forget the motherboard also has a PCI Express x16 for videocards, a PCI Express x1 for high bandwidth devices and four 32 bit PCI slots. That should allow the Epox EP-AF550G Pro to tackle anything you throw at it.

The onboard GeForce 6100 is perfectly adequate for workstation applications and does not negatively affect system performance, even though it saps a bit of system memory. The Epox EP-AF550G Pro performed just as well as higher end nVIDIA nForce 570/590 SLI based motherboards in 2D tasks. The onboard videocard is not really powerful enough for 3D gaming. If you want to play games, get yourself an actual PCI Express x16 videocard. With a GeForce 7800GTX installed the Epox EP-AF550G Pro keeps up with the fastest Socket AM2 motherboards.

The Epox EP-AF550G Pro has some decent tweaking options in the motherboard. There's a huge list of memory timing adjustments, but the EP-AF550G Pro is not really tuned for the overclocker. The motherboard frequency options top out at just 250 MHz and without much surprise the EP-AF550G Pro had no problem hitting that.

If you need to build yourself a good all around low budget workstation computer, the Epox EP-AF550G Pro is a great platform to start from - thanks in large part to the Geforce 6100 chipset. It comes with good feature set that covers all the important bases. Budget doesn't have to mean poor performance or quality, and the Epox EP-AF550G Pro proves just that!

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