Installing

Installation was as smooth as ever. I plugged in Radeon 64MB DDR VIVO, A-Link 10/100MB PCI network adapter, 256MB DDR Crucial memory and a 1.2GHz TB processor. I decided to use the RAID controller for my hard disks so that I'd see if there were any compatibility issues with it and there were absolutely none. First I installed Windows ME and it worked like a charm and then I tried Windows XP professional build 2505 and it installed just as fine. I used WinME for all the testing.

When WinME installation was finished I downloaded newest drivers from Epox. Here is a list of all the drivers I used

- AMD AGP miniport version 4.80 for WinME
- VIA Apollo 686 chipset audio version 1.20
- HPT-370A RAID controller version 1.11.0512
- Ati Radeon display driver version 7153

I didn't try the drivers provided with the motherboard's installation CD-ROM and I'd always recommend everyone to get the latest drivers from your motherboard or chipset maker's home page. If you're not sure what you need you can usually get all the needed stuff from motherboard maker's pages.

Testing

Programs

I tested this board with a few commonly used benchmarks and one that some of you might never have heard about. The programs I used were SiSoft Sandra Professional version 2001.5.8.11, MadOnion 3Dmark2001, ID Software Quake3 Arena demo and PiFast version 3.3.

The one that might some introduction is PiFast. It is a small computation program that counts PI's decimals to extreme amounts and tells how long it took. I used a configuration that counts 4194304 decimals with Chudnovsky's method using the fastest settings of FFT size 512K. The official PiFast homepage can be found here (http://numbers.computation.free.fr/Constants/PiProgram/pifast.html). The world's fastest PiFast times can be found from here (http://www16.big.or.jp/~bunnywk/pifast.html).

Test Setup

- Epox 8K7A+ (BIOS 1711) and Epox 8KTA3 (BIOS 1518)
- AMD Athlon 10x133MHz=1333MHz
- 256MB Crucial DDR DRAM and 256MB Green SDR DRAM
- Ati Radeon 64 DDR @183MHz and Ati Radeon 32MB DDR @166MHz
- Integrated AC97' soundcard codec
- A-Link 10/100MB PC network adapter
- Seagate 4.2GB UDMA66 harddisk
- Windows Millennium
- AMD AGP miniport 4.80 for 8K7A+ and Via 4in1 4.32 for 8KTA3
- Ati Radeon display driver 4.13.7153

Tests

This test measures the pure memory bandwidth and thus the 8K7A+ with its DDR memory and 266MHz effective memory bus beats the 8KTA3 by a wide margin.

 

In Sandra's CPU Benchmark neither of these boards can really beat each other because this test is only used to benchmark pure processing power and not the memory sub system.

 

PiFast shows some really impressive times when using the 8K7A+ pared with a fast 1333MHz processor. PiFast gains a lot from the extra memory bandwidth and with DDR memory it gives a 10% boost in performance.

Page 4, more testing and conclusion