Epox 8K3A+ Motherboard Review - PAGE 1

Epox has been catering towards the more extreme overclocking crowd for a while now. I've been voltage modding boards for a while now and Epox has been taking the fun out of things lately by offering the kinds of voltages that would normally require a resistor being soldered onto a small IC chip.

What does the KT333 offer over the older KT266a? Really only two things. The first only only big improvement is the ability to run your memory asynchronous with your CPU bus. When your processor is running on a 133/266 bus you can have your RAM running at 166/333 at the same time. This gives you a 25% increase in theoretical memory bandwidth. Does this hold up though to real world usage?

The second new feature is only an improvement in the South Bridge to support ATA 133. Since most good KT266a based boards sport ATA133 RAID controllers this second feature is really no reason to upgrade.

Motherboard Specifications
Chipset	VIA KT333
Multiplier Options	6x - 15x
Bus Speed Options	100-255 MHz
Voltages	1.4 - 2.2v
Dividers	1/3, 1/4, 1/5
Memory Support	3 x 184-pin DDR
Expansion Slots	6PCI, 1AGP, 0CNR
USB Support	2x Standard USB ports on the mobo 2x USB ports on riser
Integrated Components	6-channel AC'97 Audio
Bios	AMI BIOS
Onboard IDE	2 x ATA133 EIDE 2 x ATA133 EIDE RAID

In the box

• One manual

• One quick installation guide

• One IDE ATA33 cable, One IDE ATA133 cable

• One floppy cable

• One USB riser

• One drivers CD

• One floppy disc with HPT372 drivers

• One CD with Drive image and partition magic

What is this stuff?

There's a 27 page booklet on the RAID controller and setting up your RAID arrays. A users manual dedicated just to the onboard RAID controller is nice to have for all those people who are jumping into RAID for the first time.

The users manual for the motherboard goes over all the basics of the features and it also goes over the available BIOS features. However it does not explain the BIOS features. You're expected to know what they all mean and do.

To install Windows 2k/XP on the HPT372 you are going to have to use this floppy disk. If you know of a way to get around having to use the floppy please let me know!

Partition Magic is a program that will let you change your partition sizes, make new ones and convert file systems all in windows. Drive Image is somewhat like Norton's Ghost. It's made for creating backup images of your drives. It also makes it easy to switch your drives and keep your same old OS installation. Unfortunately the version that is packaged does not support NTFS5 which is what most Windows XP users out there use.