Epox MVP3G-M Super7 Motherboard Review
Last updated: 07/29/03

CPU SUPPORT.  According to Epox, the MVP3G will support "Intel Pentium P55C/AMD K6/Cyrix 6x86MX at 133-550MHz."  AMD and I have tested it at 400 Mhz.  Epox has an updated BIOS for Rev. 0.2 of the motherboard to support the K6-3 processor.  All the boards I have seen are Rev. 0.2.  Although, 550 Mhz processors are not available yet, I would bet they would work.  I should be testing a 450 Mhz K6-2 before long.

MEMORY.  There are three 168-pin DIMM memory slots.  They are coupled to the CPU by the Northbridge with two Elite MT 512K, 5 ns high performance cache' chips.  The three memory slots can accommodate up to 384 Mbytes of PC-100 or 66 Mhz memory; but,  the 1 MByte of cache' with 8 tag bits will only cache' 256 MBytes of it.  256 Mbytes is, therefore, the practical memory  limit.

JUMPERS A' LA SIMPLIFIED. A single jumper on a header on the right, front of the board sets the core voltage.  Another header along the left, front uses two jumpers which respectively set the bus clock speed and the multiplier.  Only CPU Plug 'n Play could make it simpler, and not by much.

The chipset is spec'd at a 100 MHz front bus frequency (FSB).  However, for overclockers, there is jumper to increase the FSB to 112 Mhz.   Additional speeds can be selected in the CMOS setup.

Specific settings are:

• FSB: 66, 75, 83, 95,100, 112 Mhz

• Multiplier: 2X, 2.5X, 3X, 3.5X, 4X, 4.5X, 5X

• CPU Core Voltage: 2.1, 2.2, 2.4, 2.8, 2.9, 3.2 Volts (or remove the jumper for 3.5 volts (no separate core voltage)

The board has only three more jumpers.  The first one sets the SDRAM at 66 Mhz (which is also the AGP frequency) or the CPU Bus Clock.  If you have a 400 Mhz K6-2 and PC100 memory, simply set this jumper for CPU Bus Clock and the CPU bus frequency for 100 Mhz (and the multiplier to 4X).

The second jumper works in conjunction with an ATX power supply and remote power on/off connector which can be connected to a momentary switch on the front panel of the computer case.  The computer can be turned on or off using the momentary switch.  If the jumper (JP4) is enabled, the system can also be turned-on by pressing one or two keyboard keys (depending on the keyboard).  So, with an ATX power supply you turn off the  system power by shutting-down Windows 95/98 and you can turn it back on with the keyboard.

Finally, there is new jumper to discharge the CMOS (this is something I thought should have been on Epox's earlier boards.  I like to discharge the CMOS memory after flashing the BIOS to be sure all remnants of the old BIOS are removed form the CMOS.  Without this jumper, one has to remove the battery.)

Top | Contents | Previous | Next - Capacitors