We're usually eager to receive motherboard from Epox as they tend to push performance and overclocking abilities and thus, we were quite excited when their SLI board- the 9NPA+ SLI landed in our labs. Lets find out if the Epox tradition is continues with the 9NPA+ SLI.

Packaging

The packaging is instantly recognizable as an Epox product with their large squarish box thats white in color and has a shiny coating. As usual, the box isnt crowded with pictures or text on the front while mentioning some of the features on the back.

Inside the box, Epox bundles their power pack which features a screw driver and heatsinks for MOSFETs. Epox also bundles a thermistor- something we havent seen recently. A thermistor connects to an onboard jumper on one side while the heat sensor on the other side allows you to measure temperature of any part if the board. Rounded IDE and white Serial-ATA cables are also included along with USB headers and a fan that sticks on the back panel- more on that later.   

Layout

The 9NPA+ SLI is very much an Epox board which means that we'll continue to complain about the placement of the main power connector which Epox again places between the CPU and the video card slot. As we've mentioned numerous times before, this causes the thick power cable running all over your setup and Epox certainly needs to move this connector since all other manufacturers have moved it away from this position. Even the four pin power connector which currently sits to the left of the CPU socket needs to be moved above the CPU socket.

The four memory sockets are placed to the right of the CPU socket and next to them, Epox places the floppy and IDE connectors. The chipset supported four serial ATA ports are placed towards the bottom of the board which should be close to your hard drives. Epox also places the clearing CMOS jumper along with the USB/Firewire headers present the bottom edge. Being an SLI board, you get two x16 PCI-E slots on the 9NPA+ SLI, however, the HSF unit of the chipset sits right below these two slots and comes extremely close to touching your video cards which might be a little uncomfortable especially if you have two $400 6800GT cards stuck in there.

One thing that we really liked about this board is its diagnostic tools. Starting off, you have the Diagnostic LED like most other Epox boards along with a power and reset switch onboard. Besides that, Epox places four LEDs onboard- next to the Video slot, chipset, CPU and memory sockets and if either one of them fails to turn on, you’ll immediately know where the problem lies. One last thing is an LED bar next to the DIMM slots which is kinda like the one found on Corsair memory modules and increases/decreases based on the load upon your modules. Certainly looks cool.