eVGA nForce4 SLI Motherboard (Athlon 64 FX, Socket 939, nForce4 SLI, ATX, 4GB DDR, 1000MHz)

Reviewed by: yanfali

Strengths: High quality components, good selection of cables

Weaknesses: position of IDE and floppy connectors, bios upgrade required for linux fedora core 4, manual a little unclear, MAC address requires setting manually, RAM CL speed incorrect.

Overall: Just built two systems with this board. The capacitors and power stage on this mainboard are impressive. High quality metalized caps, combined with beefy triple phase power for the CPU. Requires a ATX 2.0, 24 pin power supply but that's standard now on SLI boards. The manual is a little unclear about the Dual Banked Memory, and actually you need to use the same color slots to enable it. BIOS appears to have a lot of nice overclocking features, which I've not tried yet. Loading FC4 requires a bios upgrade to latest from September; the hard disk would lock up with BIOS shipped. Easy to install and the layout is acceptable, power connectors are nicely positioned at the edges of the board. Diag LED is a nice bonus. Also really like the push switch reset and power for testing. Wish it had come with four SATA cables instead of one since it is really nice, but no big deal. All other cables are the nice rounded kind. The position of the IDE and floppy ports is a little awkward in the smaller Antec SLK1650B I installed them in, since it puts them underneath the hard drive. Overall a very positive first experience with evga mainboards. These guys may be the quality equivalent of Tyan in consumer mainboards.[Update]I just found two minor but annoying problems. Firstly, EVGA is clears the unique MAC address if you do a BIOS upgrade. This causes all kinds of problems on an IP network. I just wasted an afternoon figuring that one out. Bad EVGA. Secondly, the RAM CL speed is incorrectly detected by SPD and instead coming in at 2.5 instead of the marked 3. This is not cheapo RAM but Crucial. Very odd.