Epox 4PEA+ (845PE): A well rounded 845PE

Epox 4PEA+: Basic Features

Epox's 845PE board offers lots of bells and whistles very similar to ASUS's 845PE-based P4PE.

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As is the norm with most Epox motherboards, you'll find some fairly standard and common LAN and sound chips with the 4PEA+. Onboard LAN is powered by Realtek's 8100B chip. There's nothing special about this LAN chip, as it supports a basic feature set.

The onboard sound is powered by Realtek's ALC650 chip. This is exactly the same sound chip found on Albatron's 845PE board (PX845PEV Pro), among many other Epox motherboards.

The Epox 4PEA+ comes with a pretty good I/O configuration. Included are two PS/2 ports, one parallel port, one serial port, four rear USB 2.0 ports, a LAN port, and a Game Port.

One of the more interesting features available on the Epox 4PEA+ is the inclusion of Bluetooth support. This isn't really anything special, as Bluetooth is pretty severally limited in terms of speed compared to other wireless technologies like 802.11. But because Bluetooth offers much less bandwidth than 802.11 and because it's frequency range is quite small in comparison, this feature really is an insignificant novelty more than anything else for a desktop at this point.

Potential areas for use on the desktop include things such as Bluetooth keyboards and printers, but we need to see that device support first.

It's not unusual to see a HighPoint RAID controller on an Epox board, and the 4PEA+ is no different. The RAID chip is powered by the HighPoint 372 controller. This RAID chip offers up to two channels per connector as well as RAID 0 (striping) and RAID 1 (mirroring). As usual, the Primary and Secondary IDE connectors are capable of providing two channels per connector. In total, you can connect up to eight IDE devices via the four available onboard ATA connectors just by using a simple Master/Slave configuration with each drive. In this sense, the Epox 4PEA+ is very flexible, which is always a good thing.

The most interesting feature the Epox 4PEA+ brings to the table is Silicon Image's Serial ATA controller, dubbed the 3112A. This is the exact same chip found on the Intel D845PEBT2, which is part of Intel's series of "enthusiast" motherboards. This particular Serial ATA chip is capable of supporting up to two independent Serial ATA devices.

We eagerly anticipate the arrival of Serial ATA devices, especially hard drives. We'll have more info on these products very soon.