Epox 8K3A+ Motherboard Review - PAGE 1Martin Krohn - Wednesday, April 17th, 2002
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.
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Motherboard Specifications
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Chipset |
VIA KT333 |
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Multiplier Options |
6x - 15x |
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Bus Speed Options |
100-255 MHz |
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Voltages |
1.4 - 2.2v |
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Dividers |
1/3, 1/4, 1/5 |
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Memory Support |
3 x 184-pin DDR |
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Expansion Slots |
6PCI, 1AGP, 0CNR |
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USB Support |
2x Standard USB ports on the mobo 2x USB ports on riser |
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Integrated Components |
6-channel AC'97 Audio |
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Bios |
AMI BIOS |
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Onboard IDE |
2 x ATA133 EIDE 2 x ATA133 EIDE RAID |
In the box
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One manual
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One quick
installation guide
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One IDE ATA33
cable, One IDE ATA133 cable
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One floppy
cable
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One USB riser
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One drivers CD
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One floppy
disc with HPT372 drivers
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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.