EPoX EP-5P945 PRO: Budget 945P Performance
by Gary Key on September 11, 2006 4:45 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Final Thoughts
The EPoX EP-5P945 PRO is a very affordable performance budget board for the Intel market that provides an excellent feature set for around US $90. The performance of the board in the majority of the synthetic and game benchmarks was near class leading the majority of time. This is very good for EPoX as our ASRock based 945P board did not perform as well in testing. The stability of the board was excellent in all areas of testing and general usage. With that said, let's move on to our performance opinions regarding this board.
In the video area, the inclusion of a secondary PCI-E X16 slot provides for multi-monitor capability. This X16 slot will operate in X1 mode unless the two X1 PCI Express slots are disabled for X4 PCI Express capability. We had no issues utilizing two 7600GS cards for multi-monitor usage. With this setup the primary PCI-E X16 slot continues to operate in full X16 mode with the secondary video card installed.
In the performance area, the EPoX EP-5P945 PRO generated consistent and competitive benchmark scores in our gaming, general application, and synthetic tests. The stability of the board was at all times excellent during testing. Outside of performance, there are a few issues worth noting.
We did not care for the location of the 24-pin and 4-pin ATX connectors near the CPU socket due to cabling issues over our CPU heatsink/fan unit. Also, the MCH heatsink is located too close to the CPU socket. However, due to the limited overclocking ability of the Intel 945P chipset we can forgive this error, especially if the user has installed a Core 2 Duo processor. At a final 319FSB setting during overclocking with our E6300 CPU we found the board to be very stable but could not reach a higher FSB setting. In fact, by increasing our memory ratio to 4:5 during overclocking we could only reach a stable 307FSB. We recommend staying with a 1:1 ratio and purchasing low latency DDR2-533 memory for this board and others in the budget category.
Overall, the EPoX EP-5P945 PRO offers a very affordable and extremely stable platform for Intel's latest processor family. The ability of the board to use a secondary PCI Express video card in X4 capability allows those who need multi-monitor capability a unique budget option. The EPoX board is not the first choice for the computer enthusiast due to limited overclocking and memory speeds. However, it would make an excellent system for those on a limited budget looking to use an E6300 or E6400 Core 2 Duo. The inclusion of two PCI Express X1 slots and three PCI slots means this board is also very expandable. We found that while the Intel 945P chipset is not as feature laden as other chipsets it is still competitive a year after being on the market. Our opinion of the EPoX EP-5P945 PRO is the same as the Intel 945P: it may not be the sexiest offering on the market but it simply works and works quite well.
The EPoX EP-5P945 PRO is a very affordable performance budget board for the Intel market that provides an excellent feature set for around US $90. The performance of the board in the majority of the synthetic and game benchmarks was near class leading the majority of time. This is very good for EPoX as our ASRock based 945P board did not perform as well in testing. The stability of the board was excellent in all areas of testing and general usage. With that said, let's move on to our performance opinions regarding this board.
In the video area, the inclusion of a secondary PCI-E X16 slot provides for multi-monitor capability. This X16 slot will operate in X1 mode unless the two X1 PCI Express slots are disabled for X4 PCI Express capability. We had no issues utilizing two 7600GS cards for multi-monitor usage. With this setup the primary PCI-E X16 slot continues to operate in full X16 mode with the secondary video card installed.
In the performance area, the EPoX EP-5P945 PRO generated consistent and competitive benchmark scores in our gaming, general application, and synthetic tests. The stability of the board was at all times excellent during testing. Outside of performance, there are a few issues worth noting.
We did not care for the location of the 24-pin and 4-pin ATX connectors near the CPU socket due to cabling issues over our CPU heatsink/fan unit. Also, the MCH heatsink is located too close to the CPU socket. However, due to the limited overclocking ability of the Intel 945P chipset we can forgive this error, especially if the user has installed a Core 2 Duo processor. At a final 319FSB setting during overclocking with our E6300 CPU we found the board to be very stable but could not reach a higher FSB setting. In fact, by increasing our memory ratio to 4:5 during overclocking we could only reach a stable 307FSB. We recommend staying with a 1:1 ratio and purchasing low latency DDR2-533 memory for this board and others in the budget category.
Overall, the EPoX EP-5P945 PRO offers a very affordable and extremely stable platform for Intel's latest processor family. The ability of the board to use a secondary PCI Express video card in X4 capability allows those who need multi-monitor capability a unique budget option. The EPoX board is not the first choice for the computer enthusiast due to limited overclocking and memory speeds. However, it would make an excellent system for those on a limited budget looking to use an E6300 or E6400 Core 2 Duo. The inclusion of two PCI Express X1 slots and three PCI slots means this board is also very expandable. We found that while the Intel 945P chipset is not as feature laden as other chipsets it is still competitive a year after being on the market. Our opinion of the EPoX EP-5P945 PRO is the same as the Intel 945P: it may not be the sexiest offering on the market but it simply works and works quite well.
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yacoub - Monday, September 11, 2006 - link
I find it... I dunno... strange that you break out a zero-anchor graph for the gaming tests when normally in reviews you guys use a tighter graph that does not start at zero and thus makes the difference between performance seem great.I guess what I find funny is that if you used that type of graph in all of your reviews, many parts reviewed would show their true improvement which is often very very little. This reviews shows how this board barely performs any worse than the other boards charted, yet if you'd used the older method of a graph starting at, say, '60' instead of '0' people would think OMG there's a HUGE difference.
Maybe what I'm trying to say is thanks for finally using a zero-anchored graph to show true performance delta instead of a zoomed in graph where the same charts would appear to have wide difference between part performance when they really don't.
yacoub - Monday, September 11, 2006 - link
Here's what I'm talking about in comparison if anyone is wondering:http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2826&am...">http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2826&am...
Gary Key - Monday, September 11, 2006 - link
Hi,We do listen (sometimes the message takes a while to sink in) and decided to do away with the non-zero based graph or even a zoom in in this case. Although we clearly stated our purpose with the non-zero based graphs and provided one (if clicked) it appeared from comments this offering was not satisfactory either. Hopefully, we will have an updated graphing engine in the near future so this type of information can be presented in a different fashion. Thanks for the comments!
:)