Being an overclocking motherboard the EPoX allows you to change the CPUs voltage, the default voltage of a Thunderbird or Athlon XP is 1.75v and I am VERY pleased to see that I am able to up the voltage to 2.20v! With the EPoX 8KHA+ a voltage of 2.00 and above was only possible after doing a voltage MOD. If you plan on going above 1.85v you should have some very good cooling on that CPU and by good I mean water cooling or better. You can also add up to 0.70v to your DIMM voltage, the default voltage of DDR is 2.5v but by adding the 0.70v you will be able to push 3.2v through that RAM of yours. Again when putting that much voltage into your RAM you should be careful it is possible to destroy it.
Test Bed
- EPoX 8K3A+
- 1.2Ghz Thunderbird
- Corsair 512MB XMS2700
- 3DPower Geforce 3
All testing will be done at 32 bit color, vsync is off, AA is off, and all of the memory options are at the most aggressive settings. All the eye candy will be turned on at its highest for all of the game testing. Everything will be done at 1024×768, the same as all other previous testing. Below is an initial screen shot of WCPUID just for reference.
I ran SiSoft Sandra Pro 2002.1.8.59 and benchmarked the CPU, Multimedia, and memory bandwidth. As you can see they all score very high but once I start overclocking they will be much higher. Below you will see a comparison of this motherboard and the AOpen AK77-333 motherboard.
With the SiSoft Sandra CPU Arithmetic benchmarking the EPoX 8K3A+ is actually very tiny bit higher in the Dhrystone and a little lower in the Whetstone compared to the AOpen AK77-333. SiSoft Sandra is a synthetic benchmark so you can’t always rely on it for the most accurate results.
The SiSoft Sandra Multi-Media benchmarking the EPoX 8K3A+ pulled slightly ahead of the AOpen AK77-333 in both the integer and floating point benchmarks.
The SiSoft Sandra Memory Bandwidth benchmarking surprised me very much, the AOpen AK77-333 actually got a higher score than the EPoX 8K3A+ even though the AOpen board was very lacking in memory options. The EPoX 8K3A+ seems to have some real memory issues if with all of the aggressive settings cant do better than that of the AOpen AK77-333.
3DMark2000 scores improved by 93 points, I know it looks a lot more but that’s just the way Excel likes to make it look like. 3DMark2000 is also a synthetic benchmark which does not really benchmark the motherboard, however you can see that the EPoX 8K3A+ is a little ahead of the AOpen AK77-333.
3DMark2001SE got about the same boost in the final score, 110 points more than the AOpen AK77-333 not too bad if you are trying to get every little last point out of 3DMark2001SE
The EPoX 8K3A+ performed better in Serious Sam compared to the AOpen AK77-333 motherboard earning 4.5 FPS more.
And finally there was a 1 FPS improvement in Quake III, Demo001. Again there was not much of a change in the performance but these are the results
Now lets see if the AOpen AK77-333 can still hang with the EPoX 8K3A+ while overclocking!
