The EPoX 8K3A+ comes in the same style box that the 8KHA+ comes in, with a handle at the top so that you can carry your board around and make others jealous. I couldn’t wait to take this motherboard out of its anti static bag and test it out.
The EPoX 8K3A+ comes with a lot of great documentation, a main motherboard manual and a manual for the RAID, the other is in another language. The motherboard manual is very in-depth and explains everything you need to know about the board in a way which is easy to understand. It explains what all of the features that the motherboard has do and what all the BIOS options are for and what the best settings are. It also instructs you how to flash your BIOS, use Norton Ghost, and explains what the POST codes mean which can be read from the POST debug 7-segment LED.
I really like that there is a lot of information in this manual because to a new overclocker because with so many BIOS options they may not have any idea what they do and which settings to choose. You also get a cool EPoX case badge to put on your case so that people will know what kind of motherboard you have.
The EPoX 8K3A+ comes with an ATA-133 IDE cable, a floppy cable, and another ATA cable. it also comes with a USB header so that you can take advantage of all 4 USB ports.
You get 2 CDs, the first is your motherboard installation CD that has the VIA 4-in-1 drivers (4.37a), AC97 codec drivers, Bus master, USB driver, Norton Ghost 7, PC-Cillin 2000, and Acrobat Reader. Norton Ghost is a great and easy to use program, PC-Cillien is an all right anti virus program but not nearly as good as Norton in my opinion. The second CD has Partition Magic 6.0 and Drive Image 4.0, Partition Magic is a great and valuable program, I have not however used Drive Image. You also get a floppy disk which has the highpoint RAID drivers on it.
The EPoX 8K3A+ does not have any special colored PCB like a lot of other boards do however just because its a normal PCB does not mean its not as cool as the ones that do. There are 6 PCI and no CNR or AMR slots which is very good because those slots serve little purpose I believe. There is an AGP slot and 3 DIMM slots which will support up to 3GB of memory. The back of the motherboard has 3 mosfets which are somewhat of a trademark of EPoX’s.
I am very surprised that EPoX is using passive cooling on the northbridge, this is very unusual because they are built for overclockers and overclockers like to see active cooling on the northbridge. I went ahead and pulled off the little heatsink to see that it was held on by thermal tape which is just about the worst cooling solution for anything. On the EPoX 8KHA+ they used active cooling with a good amount of thermal compound on the northbride, I do not know why they decided not to with the 8K3A+.
The northbride on this motherboard is the KT333 which is the newest AMD chipset on the market right now. The VIA Apollo KT333 is the first VIA chipset to feature DDR333 memory offering 25% more memory bandwidth to the CPU. Supporting DDR200/266/333 memory and a complete range of 200/266MHz Front Side Bus AMD Athlon™ XP and AMD Duron™ processors, the VIA Apollo KT333 provides lightning fast access to the faster system memory enabling stunning performance across the full application range.
The EPoX 8K3A+ comes with a POST debug 7-segment LED which is used for troubleshooting. When a motherboard is turned on it goes through a POST (Power On Self Test) which is part of the boot sequence. During the POST hexadecimal codes are displayed on the LED display and if there is an error it will display a combination of letter and number which will give you an idea of what is wrong with your system.
You can also see the Highpoint HPT372 RAID controller which, as you might guess controls the onboard RAID. I don’t want to get too much into what RAID is but if you don’t know I will explain a little. RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, with this onboard RAID you have a few different styles of to choose from. RAID 0 which is basically like making the size and speed of 2 disks into one, RAID 1 which is mirroring of one drive to another for backup, RAID 0+1 which is RAID 0 and 1 combined and JBOD which is disk spanning.
The RAID controllers are at the bottom of the motherboard right above all of the jumpers. There is also a fan header next to the RAID and jumpers. The VT6233A chip is the southbridge of the Apollo KT333 chipset, it controls a lot of the motherboards functions, you can see more on this on the first page of this review. The BIOS is the newer style of chips compared to the older DIP chip style BIOS there is also the CMOS battery and the jumper to clear the CMOS.
The EPoX 8K3A+ has a lot of room around the processor and has holes for mounting so that you can fit all of those big heatsinks and waterblocks on. The southbridge of this chipset is able to read the internal diode of Athlon XP CPUs, but EPoX decided to stick with the little in-socket probe which are usually very unreliable. The ATX power connection is in a good place and not in the way of anything, there are also 2 fan headers right around it.
The Winbond W83697HF chip controls the monitoring of voltage, temperature, and fan speed. To the right of the Winbond chip is the ALC650 AC’97 codec which controls the onboard 6.1 audio, I really like the little crap on the chip too, he looks cool. You can also see the SPDIF jumpers in between the 2 chips which will allow you to connect to your digital devices like CD player, sampler or DAT. The I/O backplane is the standard layout which most motherboards use, there are all the normal connections.
There are a few issues that I need to point out, first the DIMM slots are positioned poorly so that when you have RAM installed you will not be able to take it out or install anymore if you have a video card installed. There also looks to be the same problem with the capacitor right next to the AGP slot that will interfere with some of the Geforce 4 Ti 4600 video cards. I do not have a Ti 4600 to test with this motherboard but as you can see from my Geforce 3 it is already pretty close.
