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

The Board Continued :

Not such an unusual feature these days is the inclusion of active cooling atop the board's North Bridge. While in the past these were not really essential additions until you started pushing the FSB, the VT8366A North bridge did feel a bit warmer than I remember from KT266 boards so perhaps it's actually a functional addition this time.

Another feature you'll recognise if you've seen or owned previous motherboards from the Epox stable is the onboard P80P Debug LED. This works in the same way as the rows of coloured LEDs you see on MSI and dome other boards, but because it uses two seven segment LEDs it is able to report more accurately. The idea is that if the power on self test procedure detects a fault and stalls, the hex code generated on the LED can be checked against a table of codes in the back of the manual pinpointing exactly what the problem is. The list of error codes is very complete, though most of them I would guess are used for testing the board at an engineering stage and are of limited use to the home user.

Installation :

Fitting of the board was no easier and harder than with any other board out there. I slotted a single 256MB stick of Kingmax PC2100 into one of the three available DIMM sockets, and for cooling I opted for the Swiftech MCX370-A. As you can see, it wasn't too difficult to keep the power cables well away from the CPU and even those of you with shorter cables shouldn't have much of a problem. Those with a keen eye will notice that the Debug LED is reading FF, which is the hex code for "boot attempt" and which displays constantly after a successful boot, so you at least know she was running :o)

The only thing you really need to remember during the installation is to set the fsb range jumper (arrowed) to either 100 or 133MHz. It is set to 100MHz by default.

Other than this the 8KHA+ is a genuine jumperless design with all settings for multiplier, fsb and a host of tweaking options where we like them best.......in the BIOS.

Overclocking :

The exact same configuration that was used here was also used for testing both the DFI AK76 and the Abit KG7 RAID, and although the Abit did the better of the two, it still only managed around 150MHz FSB with a few core and VDIMM voltage tweaks. With those kind of results I was expecting that either I had been unlucky with my memory or that there were other problems somewhere I'd have to learn to live with. I decided to take no chances and backed up my HDD using the supplied copy of Norton Ghost, then feeling strangely confident at how well things had gone I lowered the multiplier and went straight for the magic 150MHz FSB, actually I went to 155MHz just to prove what a rebel I am :).

Immediate success suggested that perhaps the DFi AK76 and the Abit KG7-RAID aren't such hot overclockers. Feeling pretty bullet proof at this point I took it up again, this time to 160MHz.

No problem, 160MHz was every bit as stable as 155 was. In fact at this point I got so engrossed in what I was doing I didn't bother to take any more screenshots, but you can trust me when I tell you the board hit 165MHz rock solid. At this point I remembered that I hadn't backed off the memory timings, nor had bothered yet to increase either the core or memory voltage so not only was she running at 165MHz fsb, she was doing it at stock voltage and using the "Turbo" system setting and associated memory timings. By now it was getting late, but after about 15 minutes fiddling I reached a stable 171MHz which I consider pretty impressive for the relatively small amount of time I spent tweaking the settings, and allowing for the fact that this memory, while not the cheapest around (£21 for 128MB from Overclock.co.uk), it certainly isn't your wallet busting performance rated stuff.

Page 4, The BIOS