Board Revision: 1.2

BIOS Version: 1.20 (January 3, 2000)

This is the first time I have ever reviewed a motherboard from Eüpa. It is a Chinese company, which concentrates on motherboards, situated in Shanghai and to be found at www.eupacomputer.com . They sent us their VP1, based on VIAs 693A North Bridge and the 686A South Bridge.

Features: Four PCI, one ISA, AMR, UltraDMA/66, AC97 sound system, two USB, two serial, one parallel, three DIMM sockets and three fan headers. Up to 768 MByte SDRAM can be installed, but the board cannot make use of ECC. Wake on LAN, Ring and RTC is supported as well as standard monitoring features. Great to see that the connector panel pins have been marked very clear.

I could not find a manual in the package - only a single sheet, printed on each side. Here you will find all necessary information, but no installation guide, no BIOS description and no additional information. Also the processor retention system has to be installed by the user, what could take some time in case you don't know what these parts are for.

CPU configuration is done by jumpers only. At least you can also adjust the PCI and AGP dividers by one jumper each. Supported bus speeds are 66, 75, 83, 100, 103, 112, 124, 133, 140 and 150 MHz, so overclockers should basically be satisfied. As with many other boards, the memory clock can be reduced by 33 MHz. Not the best news regarding the board's design: Both IDE connectors are in front of the AGP and the first PCI slot.

So far so good - if there wasn't the unfortunate instance that the board did not want to start at all with a Coppermine. It worked both with an old Klamath as well as with Deschutes and Mendocino, but I couldn't convince the Eüpa to work with the latest Intel processor.