3DVelocity would like to thank Epox-UK and especially Andrew Cotterill for their help and courtesy in providing this motherboard for review.

Introduction :

Unless you've been hiding under a rock for the past few months, you've no doubt heard some of the buzz about VIA's latest socket A DDR core logic chipset, the KT266A. The original version, known as KT266 was launched to great applause, but as other vendors began to add support for DDR it quickly became apparent that the KT266 was not quite as hot as was first believed. VIA are becoming well known for their ability to react quickly, and that's exactly what they did. Not wanting to play second fiddle to anybody else, they took their KT266 back to the drawing board and searched for a way to to pump out a bit more performance, and the KT266A was born.

In this review I'll be looking at the Epox 8KHA+. Built around the KT266A and with all the hallmarks of Epox design, can this board bolster the Epox armory and find a place alongside the already much respected 8K7A? Before we try to find out, let's have a closer look at the KT266A chipset.

The Chipset :

KT266A is the first chipset designed under what VIA lovingly call their "Performance driven Design Philosophy". VIA realised that the key to board performance, and the reason for the rather ordinary performance of its KT266, lies in optimising the memory controller. In addition to tightening the timings, VIA also added the ability to burst up to eight quad words of data per clock, double the four words handled by KT266. Data queues were also deepened resulting in an overall boost in general performance.

The KT266A also complies with VIA's V-MAP (VIA Modular Architecture Platform) which simply means that it is pin compatible with past, current and future products. While that might not seem important to you as an end user, it is because it means motherboard manufacturers have far more flexibility in the design stages and get get new products to market quicker.

Combine these features with VIA's impressive V-LINK technology which provides a dedicated 266MB/sec bus between North and South bridges and we have a pretty well rounded package that should offer some impressive results. By removing the dependency on the PCI bus, VIA is able to offer a dedicated, quad pumped 66MHz bus between North and South bridge

With the 552 pin VT8366A taking care of North Bridge functions, the 376 pin VT8233 rounds off the package with its two ATA-100 IDE controllers, support for six USB ports and six PCI slots, ACPI and APM power management features and high quality, six channel AC/97 2.2 audio. The VT8233 is network-ready solution which offers (VT8233C only) an integrated 3Com Ethernet MAC controller with high quality 10/100 support.

Page 2, Looking at the board