EPoX EP-4PDA2+ Mainboard Review

If you like to see more hardware reviews on OS/2 e-Zine in the future add a comment in the forum. The main reason testing this motherboard was getting to know how OS/2 is working with todays hardware and what kind of components are supporting OS/2 and what kind do not operate with OS/2.

Features

There are different version of this mainboard available, the plus(+) model has got all optional components included and ships with built-in Gigabit Ethernet instead of 10/100Mbit only.

The EP-4PDA2+ uses the familiar Intel i865PE (Springdale-PE) Chipset which consists of the Memory Controller Hub (MCH) and the I/O Controller Hub (ICH5/R). The dual channel memory interface is able to transfer up to 6.4 GB/sec (PC3200 DDR memory with 400MHz clock speed) up to 4GB of memory size can be installed. It supports Pentium4 CPUs (Socket 478) with Hyper-Threading (HT) Technology and 800MHz FSB up to 3.2GHz. The AGP 3.0 interface provides support for AGP4X/8X modes and Fast Write Transactions. Other features like Firewire, SATA/PATA RAID, Wake-on-LAN and the Norton Ghost7 / PC-Cillin AV software bundle are also included.

• Award BIOS 6.00G
• 5 PCI Busmaster slots (32bit)
• USB 1.x/2.0 4/4 ports
• Ultra ATA/100 Busmaster IDE Controller 2 ports
• Serial ATA interface 2 ports
• Gigabit Ethernet (Broadcom BCM5705) 1 port
• IEEE1394 Firewire (Agere Fw323) 3 ports
• S-ATA RAID (SIL3112A) 2 ports
• IDE RAID (HPT372) 2 ports
• 6 channel audio (C-Media CMI9739A)

     
the new SATA interface cable on the very right side of the picture

OS/2 Install

Before you're going to install adjust some BIOS settings first. The 2 builtin RAID controller Silicom Image SIL3112A and HIGHPOINT HPT372 can be disabled because OS/2 does not support them and speeding up the boot process. The IEEE1394/Firewire controller also can be disabled, because no driver is available but it might be supported in the future, check the new Firewire project on Netlabs. The SATA Mode was set to Compatible Mode with RAID function disabled, the 2 SATA ports will be mapped as Master/Slave for the primary PATA controller. The chipset and the processor are both HT (Hyperthreading) ready but the OS/2 kernel does not support that feature, so the HT function can be disabled as well and OS/2 is going to run very fast on this system, no need for HT ;-)
Note: In BIOS you can always find some options for OS/2 like "Boot to OS/2" or memory settings for OS/2, just leave them disabled because these settings are for OS/2 2.x and current OS/2 versions are going to work without these settings enabled.

The next step is the installation of OS/2. If you own eComstation 1.xx (eCS) or IBM OS/2 Warp 4 Convience Package 2 (MCP2) the installation should be no problem at all, but often not all required drivers are included. The review was done with OS/2 Warp4 with Update Package applied (can be installed from CD-ROM). The test machine was having the following configuration (mainboard rev2.1):

• Intel Pentium4 2.6GHz, 512KB Cache, 800MHz FSB
• 2x 256MB DDR400 memory (PC3200)
• His Radeon 9600Pro 128 MB
• Maxtor DaimondMax 6Y080L0 HDD 80GB
• Toshiba DVD-ROM Drive SD-M1802

Both IDE drivers IBM1S506.ADD and the DANIS506.ADD (latest version) both support the ICH5 I/O controller. The DANIS506.ADD driver is the better choice, because the boot process is much faster, the v1.6.7 of the driver was able to run the HDD in UDMA6 and the DVD-ROM drive in UDMA2 mode. The USB 1.1 and 2.0 controller works with the latest IBM UHCI and EHCI USB drivers (usbbasic). The graphics adapter is very well supported by the familiar Scitech SNAP! driver (v2.3.0) and the C-Media sound device did work with the Uniaud driver (uniaud20031024). At least the onboard Broadcom Gigabit NIC works with the NDIS2 driver v7.03 and later from Broadcom, earlier version of this driver always fails to detect the NIC.

     
network setup information

Benchmarks

     

CPU
CPU integer-marks	1819.248
CPU floating point-marks	394.030
DIVE
Video bus bandwidth	982.876	Megabytes/second
DIVE fun	3219.735	fps normalised to 640x480x256
M->S, DD, 1.00:1	3352.447	fps normalised to 640x480x256
DIVE-marks	1243.951
OTHER
File I/O-marks	21221.346
Memory-marks	5917.639
Disk I/O-marks	258.728
CD I/O-marks	164.091
Simultaneous Disk I/O (Maxtor 6Y080L0)	56.343	Megabytes/second

Conclusion

I don't miss the lack of support for the RAID controller because only 1 HDD is attached but a working Firewire would be nice. In the end the EP-4PDA2+ is a fast and reliable mainboard with most devices working with OS/2. It's great to see that there is a good driver support outside IBM, thanks to the developers of all these drivers!

On a regular basis I plan to review current hardware for OS/2 e-zine, tell me what you think about it! If you have any corrections or additional information drop me a note.

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