Epox 8K7A+ Review

Author : Timo Savolainen: 23rd July 2001

Features

The Epox 8K7A+ is really a rich board when it comes to features. If you want to see a list of all the features I'd say the best place to check it is from Epox's homepage (http://www.epox.com/html/english/products/motherboard/ep-8k7a+.asp) The board comes with 1 AGP, 6 PCI and two DDR DIMM slots. There are only two memory slots because officially the AMD761 supports only two DDR slots if pared with normal DDR DIMMs or four with the more expensive registered DDR DIMMs. Even thought the chipset shouldn't support more than two slots it seems like there is a way to figure a way around that as Abit has done with their KG7 board. Also there are the standard two USB ports onboard and two more additional external ports. The board is also using the standard built-in AC97 "digital audio". There are the standard speaker, line-in, microphone and joystick/MIDI ports. If you want to use an external soundcard the onboard sound is easily disabled from the BIOS.

The + version of the board comes with Highpoint HPT370A ATA100 RAID controller allowing you to add 4 more IDE devices. For people like me using a lot of hard disks and CD/DVD drives the additional two IDE ports are really a great feature. For example if someone has a CD-burner, DVD-ROM and a couple of hard disks, the two IDE connectors just aren't quite enough. And that's not all folks! The HPT370A is a RAID controller and that is a nice feature to have. It supports four different (0,1,0+1 & JBOB) types of RAID. RAID-0 is called striping and is used for creating big and fast entities from a few smaller disk drives. It does this by copying data simultaneously to more than one drive thus increasing overall speed. Data is also read from these multiple drives at the same time making for much quicker data gathering. RAID-1 is called mirroring and is used for performing back-ups. It literally mirrors all the data sent to one disk drive to the other one. If you want to know more about RAID and RAID controllers there are a lot of pages on the web about them.

I hadn't really seen RAID in action before and I have to say I was really impressed when I tried it. I used two old Seagate hard disks for testing and even though I didn't perform any synthetic benchmarks I really noticed a big difference in performance. The disks I used were a 3.2GB UDMA33 drive and a 4.3GB UDMA66 disk. These ones aren't really that fast if compared to those new fancy 80GB UDMA100 drives out there. The procedure of getting these disks to do some RAID-0 action was amazingly simple. I just plugged them in the motherboard's yellow HPT370A powered IDE ports and from the controller's own BIOS defined these two disks to be used as a stripe array. Then I checked the drives with PQMagic and they were shown as one 6.2GB drive (that's two times the smaller one minus some space needed for the RAID). After formatting it I booted the system from WinME CD-ROM and installed the OS to that new RAID without a problem.

Epox introduced their own "P80P Debug (POST) Card on board design with LED display" in the 8KTA3 series of motherboards and that's something that also this board has. The idea is that those two numeric LED displays show a code, which tells you if everything is as it should be and if something's amiss you can check the error code from the manual to see what the problem is. This feature really comes in handy if you just can't figure out where the problems are.

The board has also the standard hardware monitoring functions provided by the Via VT8C686B chipset.

Overclocking and tweaking

BIOS

From BIOS you can't really do that much. Of course you can tweak all the possible memory options such as CAS latency and other timing values. There are also a few settings for AGP that I haven't seen before. Such as "AGP Secondary Lat Timer" (something to do with AGP latencies...?) and "AGP Always Compensate". I'm sure these are great for those hardcore tweakers out there but I have no idea what they are supposed to do.

When it comes to overclocking the BIOS can't offer that much. The only thing you can tweak there is the FSB. That's not bad as with the newest BIOS Epox added a 1/5 PCI divider so that if using 166MHz FSB the PCI and IDE buses won't get overclocked. That helps a lot with PCI stuff but doesn't really help if the limiting factor is your AGP card as with a 166MHz FSB your AGP bus will run at 83MHz. The reason the guys at Epox added the new divider was to get higher FSB speeds. Now you can pump it up all the way to 250Mhz (500MHz DDR!) in 1MHz increments! That is a lot and I really mean it. There is also one jumper onboard that defines if the default FSB is 100MHz or 133MHz

DIPs and jumpers

There is one set of DIPswitches on the board, which is used for changing the CPU multiplier ranging from x5 to x12.5. I'd really like to see higher multipliers but I hope that can be fixed later with BIOS upgrades

The CPU voltage is controlled by one set of jumpers near the CPU socket. The manual says that you can raise the vcore by 0.4V (1.75V+0.4V=2.15V) max and even though that is more than most of the other boards has to offer it's just not quite enough for some people. Well luckily there is an undocumented feature which let's you raise the voltage by a whopping 0.7V (1.75V+1.7V=2.45V!!). That should be enough even for me...

Also the DDR voltage is adjusted by a set of jumpers. The default is 2.5V and with this board you can raise it to 2.9V and with a few tricks even to 3.0V.

FSB Overclocking

With stock cooling for the chipset I was able to get 159MHz FSB stable but I thought that I might be able to get a little bit higher. I took off the stock cooler and replaced it with a bigger 50x50x25 cooler with a bigger fan on it. Then I raised the memory voltage all the way to 2.9V and started trying and here are the results. That's 184MHz FSB (368MHz DDR). I think that's rather impressive. Maybe the board wouldhave been able to get some more but the memory was lagging behind. Or maybe not =)

Page 3, installing and testing