Epox EP-BX7+
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The Epox BX7+ has the biggest board size of all products in this review. You can easily recognize it, as it comes with an integrated debug port and two digits. In spite of the impressive size, the design is not too smart, as both IDE ports have been placed in front of the PCI slots. On the other hand, it comes with six of them, so you will certainly be able to find a place for one or two full size expansion cards.
Four DIMM sockets are ready for up to 1 GByte ECC SDRAM. And there is one ISA slot for older components. The Epox board comes with a feature, which no other board is able to provide: The HighPoint HPT368 IDE controller is RAID-capable. Thus you can stripe two, three or even four drives in order to increase your disk subsystem's performance.
Just like the Asus CUBX, Epox' BX7+ has five USB ports. What a pity that the adapter cable is not included. The on-board debug ports shows every system state as a hexadecimal number, which makes the search for wrong configurations or defective hardware much easier.
Overclockers will be happy to hear that the system speed can be adjusted in 1 MHz increments. Additionally, the CPU voltage can also be increased. All CPU settings have to be done via DIP switches, which you can easily spot on the picture (blue).
Epox offers a BX motherboard, which comes with high performance, excellent system stability and two features, which are not provided by any competitor: IDE RAID and a debug port.
