With overclocking becoming more and more prominent these days where everyone wants to push all of their hardware to the limits companies have started catering to everyone’s demands. EPoX is a prominent company in the overclocking business, they strive to provide the highest quality motherboards that will allow for the highest overclock possible.
Designed with VIA’s KT333 chipset, the EP-8K3A+ is a high quality motherboard built by EPoX in the industry standard ATX format. In addition to the AGP interface for high performance graphics, this board offers six industry standard PCI, one 4x compatible AGP expansion buses as well as many other advanced system and BIOS features.
The EPoX 8K3A+ has a lot of features which most current KT333 motherboards have, however these are just the basic features. It comes with the standard I/O backplane, it supports Durons, Thunderbirds, and Athlon XPs, and most likely will support the upcoming Throughbreads, although I can’t say for sure. 3 DDR-SDRAM Slots for PC2700, ATA-133 IDE and UltraDMA-100+33 RAID controller.
Supports Socket A Processors
AMD Athlon & Duron.
VIA Apollo KT333 AGPset.
I/O Controller.
1 Floppy drive controller,
1 Parallel port (EPP, ECP),
2 Serial ports.
USB.
2x USB 1.1 connectors (2 more as option).
Award PnP BIOS. Flash upgradeable.
120MB ATAPI floppy drive and ZIP support!
Standard ATX form factor.
305mm x 245mm ATX.
UltraDMA-133 EIDE Controllers. (Up to 4 IDE devices).
Backwards compatible with PIO mode 3/4 & UltraDMA-33/66/100
Additional UltraDMA-100+33 RAID controller x2. (Up to 4 devices)..
3x DDR-SDRAM Slots for PC2700.
3GB max. supported.
PS/2 connectors.
1 PS/2 mouse, 1 PS/2 keyboard.
6 (32-bit) PCI, 1 AGP.
AGP supports 1x, 2x and 4x modes.
Built-in Digital Audio:
Dual full-duplex Direct Sound channels
FM synthesis for legacy compatibility
Supports game and MIDI port
The EPoX 8K3A+ is no ordinary everyday users motherboard, this thing comes with a lot to offer to people who want high voltage, lots of options, and high overclocking. The EPoX 8K3A+ does all of the voltage, multipler, memory and every other option you might need to change through the BIOS. The only 2 jumpers that are on this motherboard are for selecting the CPU host clock and to clear the CMOS.
Extended Functions
Supports Hardware Monitoring Function by W83697HF
Supports exclusive KBPO (KeyBoard Power On)
Supports CPU Vcore setting via BIOS
Supports Memory Voltage setting via BIOS
Supports CPU Clock setting via BIOS
Supports STR (Suspend To RAM) power saving Function
Supports CPU Multiplier setting via BIOS
Supports Wake-On-LAN Function
Post port onboard design with LED display
Supports Hardware Monitoring Function by W83697HF
Supports exclusive KBPO (KeyBoard Power On)
Supports CPU Vcore setting via BIOS
Supports Memory Voltage setting via BIOS
Supports CPU Clock setting via BIOS
Supports STR (Suspend To RAM) power saving Function
Supports CPU Multiplier setting via BIOS
Supports Wake-On-LAN Function
Post port onboard design with LED display
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.
The BIOS is the standard AWARD layout, you can see that the BIOS contains most of the same main sections as other motherboards do. There is a big difference though, what’s inside of these categories is much greater than most motherboards. The standard and advanced features sections have the general boot, time, and other things which are not of very much importance.
The Advanced Chipset Features menu has 3 submenus and 2 options, the first submenu is DRAM Clock/Drive control, this menu is where you will do all of your memory tweaking. The AGP & P2P Bridge Control contains options for your video card settings. The CPU and PCI Bus Control menu is where you will select the options for your PCI and bus options.
The DRAM Clock/Drive Control menu is extraordinary! There are so many memory-tweaking options that they would not fit on my screen at without having to scroll down. The DRAM clock setting can be 133 and 166 which will determine the speed of your DDR. You can then choose what kind of settings you want, I have all of the memory options settings at the most aggressive and fastest. My RAM was set to 2-2-2 CMD 1 with 4 way bank interleaving. The AGP & P2P Bridge Control menu is also good with all of the options that you will need for your video card, I have My AGP Aperture set to 128Mb, my AGP mode to 4x, and AGP fast write enabled along with AGP Master 1 WS Write/Read.
The Integrated Peripherals menu is where you can change all the settings for most of the onboard things such as the IDE, floppy, sound, modem and so on. You can enable and disable a lot of the USB options here as well as what you want the initial display device to be. The Onboard PCI Device menu is where you will enable/disable your onboard audio. The Power Management Setup section is where all the ACPI, power saving, and sleep options are.
The PNP/PCI Configurations section is just that, you can choose some of your PNP and PCI options here. You can select IRQ settings and set whether your OS is plug and play compatible. The PC Health Status menu is where you can see temperatures, fan RPM, and voltages of your system. You also have some options, you can have your system warn or shut itself down if the CPU gets too hot, which is a very good idea otherwise you could fry it. You can also enable and disable the PC Health in the POST, I prefer to keep this on just to make sure everything is good while POSTing.
The Frequency/Voltage Control section is also very good, the EPoX 8K3A+ does all multiplier, voltage, and FSB settings via the BIOS. With no jumpers or DIP switches overclocking is much easier and less time consuming because you can do it all without opening up your case.
The multiplier setting in the BIOS goes up to 15 in .5 increments so with an unlocked CPU you can drop it to achieve a higher FSB or higher it to keep the same FSB while still overclocking the CPU. The FSB (Front Side Bus) is changed in the BIOS in 1Mhz increments which can be easily entered into the red box by typing whatever setting you like up to 255.
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!
Overclocking with the EPoX 8K3A+ is a breeze, because every setting that you would need to change to overclock can be done through the BIOS there is no need to open up your case and mess with jumpers or DIP switches. The way I always overclock is to get the highest possible FSB while keeping my system stable and increasing the overall speed of my CPU in Mhz. Because of all the voltage and memory options with this motherboard I had no problem at all overclocking my 1.2Ghz Thunderbird to 1.3Ghz with a FSB of 185.
I know that a 100Mhz overclock is not very much but I would rather have a high FSB and a few Mhz less than visa versa. I increased my core voltage to 1.85v and the DIMM voltage to 2.9v to achieve this speed. I would have been able to get a much better overclock if I had put a watercooling system on this motherboard and cranked the voltage up to 2.20v. All of the memory settings were at the fastest as well, 2-2-2-1CMD 4-way bank interleave.
I did however encounter some problems, I was able to overclock the FSB higher than 185, however when I reached about 200 I started to get AGP tearing where the screen would look as if the video cards RAM was messed up, displaying all kinds of stuff on the screen.
I know that my RAM wasn’t holding me back and I don’t believe it was my video card. I have talked to others who share the same experience when reaching a FSB of 200 so I do not believe that it is an isolated incidence. Another thing is that even at 185 FSB I don’t get very good memory scores in SiSoft I have as well talked to others who experience the same problems.
For all of the benchmarking I was using the 4/10 beta BIOS which EPoX sent to me, I think that they might be trying to fix some of this issues.
I ran SiSoft Sandra Pro 2002.1.8.59 and benchmarked the CPU, Multimedia, and memory bandwidth. The CPU and Multi-Media benchmarks do well however like I mentioned the memory benchmark is not that great, it should be a lot higher for a FSB of 185.
There is a great rise in score while overclocked compared to the stock speed on the CPU benchmark.
The SiSoft Sandra Multi-Media benchmarking the EPoX 8K3A+ pulled slightly ahead of the default speeds while overclocked.
The SiSoft Sandra Memory Bandwidth benchmarking Surprised me very much, even with a FSB of 185 the memory scores are not the best, don’t get me wrong they are not bad but with this high of a FSB they should be higher.
3DMark2000 scores improved by 233 points, again this is more of a video card benchmark but you can see that there is an improvement.
3DMark2001SE had an increase of 224 point after overclocking, not very much but this is about the norm of score improvement when overclocking the CPU. 3DMark2001SE is mainly for testing of video cards which is why there is not a huge margin.
Serious Sam gained 1.7 FPS while overclocked compared to the results from the default speeds. Serious Sam usually does not jump in FPS very much while overclocking the CPU.
To my surprise Quake III gained 9 FPS for a total of 172, with a little video card overclocking I am sure that 200 FPS would be possible.
Conclusion
This motherboard is by far the best motherboard that I have ever reviewed or even used for that matter even with the low memory scores. There are so many options and features on this motherboard that almost anything is possible.
The main reason why I like this board so much is the fact a core voltage of 2.20v is possible and a 3.20v DIMM voltage. I also really like that there are so many memory options so that I can overclock my RAM in the process of overclocking. Even with all the memory settings there seems to be something that needs to be fixed with the motherboard because of the low memory scores.
There is also the issue of the 200 FSB or above making AGP cards display errors. It’s also great to see that there are 6 PCI slots, and no CNR or AMR which are usually pointless. The onboard RAID is also a great feature which you can take advantage of.
Overall I would give this motherboard a 9/10 and award it the OCmodshop Seal of Approval. I would like to thank EPoX for sending me this motherboard to review and Corsair for sending me the 2700DDR to use in this motherboard, I will have a full review of this RAM within the next few days.
- Awesome overclocker
- Lots of memory tweaking options
- Vcore up to 2.20v
- VDIMM up to 3.20v
- 6 PCI with no CNR or AMR
- Onboard RAID
- Lots of room around the socket
Cons
- Passive northbridge cooling
- No USB 2.0
- Poor DIMM slot placement
- Poor memory scores