Epox 8K7A+ Review

Author : Timo Savolainen: 23rd July 2001

Introduction

Epox is a Taiwanese company founded in 1995 so they aren't really new to the whole motherboard business. The first time I ever heard about Epox was when a friend of mine bought a brand new motherboard and AMD K6-2 processor to upgrade his old computer. I had never heard about Epox before and was a little skeptical about the EP-MVP3C board but we thought that we'd give it try. For the first months it was really a pain in the ass with a few too many compatibility and stability issues. With some BIOS updates Epox managed to kill more or less all the bugs from the board and get the performance up to the level it should be. That friend of mine is still using the same motherboard and with the newest BIOS it's a really stable and fast one (at least as fast as a K6-2 can be..). To me this proved that Epox really keeps working even with their older motherboards to make all of their customers happy.

Over the years Epox has released a lot of motherboards for practically all CPU's there have been ranging from socket-7 Pentiums to Slot-2 Xeons and socket-A Athlons. None of these has really been truly successful and well known in the hardware and overclocking community. At least not until the EP-8KTA3. It is one of the most stable and fastest KT133A boards for your Athlon or Duron processor. People really liked the 8KTA3-series but how about their try in the DDR-field? That's when the 8K7A(+) comes in to the picture.

The Chipset

With the Athlon processor came the 200MHz and 266MHz FSB speeds. Before people associated FSB with memory bus speeds but with Athlon things are a little different. While the memory speed can be 100MHz or 133MHz Athlons internal bus runs at double speed. This of course is not quite an optimal situation, as the processor has to wait to get the data from the memory bus. The standard Athlon (that includes Athlon, Thunderbird and Duron) was designed for SDR (Single Data Rate) memory but even so the memory is a huge bottleneck in today's processors.

Last fall AMD introduced the AMD-760 DDR (Double Data Rate) chipset to replace the older AMD-750 and other SDR chipsets. The 760 is designed for DDR-memory and doesn't support any other memory type. Even though the chipset wasn't suppose to be available to the masses AMD has pumped up it's production little by little due to other chipset makers (Ali, SIS, VIA) delays with their own DDR systems. Today a lot of motherboard manufacturers have an AMD761 (AMD761 is the northbridge and AMD762 the southbridge) board to offer for their customers, Epox being one of them.

Epox chose Via 686B chip to be used as the southbridge in 8K7A(+). AMD has its own southbridge the AMD-762 but because Via's offering has a lot more features and is also a little cheaper I'd say that was a wise choice. For example the 686B offers AC97' sound codec and UDMA100 IDE bus.

 

The Board

Epox has tuned the boards' layout really nicely with everything being right where it should be. Space around the socket-A is really clean and empty making it easy to install even a bigger cooler such as the Alpha PEP66, which I used for cooling in this article. There was however a little problem with the Alpha. If the cooler is installed normally it sits in its place perfectly. Normally the fan is on the backside of the board near the PS2, USB, COM and LPT connectors. I installed the alpha the other way around to get make the airflow in my case as optimal as possible and needed to make some small modifications. The cooler sitting on top of the AMD760 chip is a few millimeters too close the CPU so I had to cut one corner off from the fan.

Epox did a really great job placing the ATX power connector in the border of the board between the memory slots and socket-A. If some of you have ever been toying with 8KTA3 you must've noticed how badly placed the connector was. It was between the AGP slot and socket-A so that the power wires were always in the way when installing and removing CPU or cooler and also messing up the airflow.

The IDE connectors (all four of them!) and floppy connector are placed in the front of the board in the same direction as the memory slots and not the other way around as in 8KTA3. I think this is a great improvement as now the IDE cables can be nicely put aside leaving the memory slots more open.

In the lower left corner you can see two numeric led connectors that are used for Epox's own debug function. I'll tell you a little more about that nice feature a little later.

Page 2, features and overclocking