EPoX EP-MF570 SLI board awarded the Editor's Choice Enthusiast Silver Award from Hardocp.com

EPoX EP-MF570 SLI board awarded the Editor's Choice Enthusiast Silver Award from Hardocp.com, Conclusion Dan's Thoughts: My overall impression of the board is a good one. While not having as good a layout as some other motherboards or as nice of an included bundle, the MF570SLI has no real shortcomings aside from perhaps not being an overclocking king. The BIOS, features and stability of the board were excellent overall, but not perfect. In my stability tests at stock speeds I occasionally ran into an application crash during torture tests. One such instance was constant crashing of Super Pi while running two instances of Prime 95. Still that type of use is way beyond what most people will subject their systems to, but I feel that it was worth mentioning. Additionally the BIOS could be laid out a little better. The Power-BIOS section is a little far from the memory settings and I felt it was somewhat counter intuitive. The board has outstanding performance at stock speeds and a great set of features, and you will not find yourself in the position of paying for a lot of over the top options that you probably won't ever use. If you are looking for a socket AM2 motherboard on a budget this one is worth considering. Kyle's Thoughts: Before handing any mobo off to Dan or any other editor for testing I use a RAID 0 disk array as my primary install drive configured on the primary controller if it is supported. Given NVIDIA’s horrid issues with installing a fresh OS to a RAID array using their controller in the past, I was very interested in what I would find. Using the supplied driver from the CD pulled onto a floppy disk, my install to a RAID 0 array went without problem as we have seen on other NVIDIA 5 series motherboards. After our OS install we Ghost the partition to a back up drive. Using the Ghost floppy boot disk alone would not allow me to Ghost the partition as we have seen on some other NVIDIA chipset motherboards. However, fully installing Ghost and using it through Windows worked fine. With these new 5 series controllers, enthusiasts wanting to install a fresh OS should be able to do so without issue. Moving onto stability testing the EPoX MF570SLI did shine as we really put the screws to it. The board ran stable with three instances of Prime95 running (2 instances stressing CPU and the other stressing RAM) for a couple of days.