Motherboards

EPoX 8K9A2+ Motherboard Review

Brandon0

I have always been a fan of EPoX motherboards and have used them a lot because of their stability, features, and overclockability. I reviewed the EPoX 8K3A+ a while back here at OCmodshop which used the VIA KT333 chipset. This is the EPoX 8K9A2+ motherboard which uses the KT400 chipset.

The VIA KT400 chipset brings some good new features to the table like DDR400 support, 8x AGP, onboard LAN, SATA, ATA133, 6 USB 2.0 ports and many other things which can be seen below.

The main reason that I have always liked EPoX motherboards is because they are great overclockers. With the 8K3A+ Vcore voltages of above 2.00v being offered it gave a lot of room for overclocking. Along with the ability to use high voltages without doing any modifications they usually offer a large amount of memory tweaking options.

VIA KT400 Specifications

  • Supports AMD Athlon™ XP processors
  • 200/266/333MHz FSB settings
  • 200/266/333MHz System bus settings
  • Support for AGP 2X/4X/8X
  • Supports up to 4.0GB DDR200/266/333SDRAM
  • 8X V-Link 533MB/s high bandwidth North/South Bridge interconnect
  • Support for Advanced Communications Riser (ACR) Card Standard
  • Integrated 6 channel Surround Sound AC-97 Audio
  • Integrated MC-97 Modem
  • Integrated 10/100 Ethernet MAC
  • Support for ATA 33/66/100/133
  • Support for USB 2.0, 6 USB ports, UHCI compliant
  • Advanced power management capabilities including ACPI/OnNow
  • 664-pin BGA VT8368 North Bridge
  • 487-pin BGA VT8235 South Bridge

The EPoX 8K9A2+ has a lot of features which most current KT400 motherboards have. It supports Durons, Thunderbirds, Athlon XPs, and Thoroughbreds. There are 3 DDR Slots for PC3200 (it can handle faster RAM of course) and the voltage on the RAM can be increased to 3.2v. There are 4 USB 2.0 ports with another 2 optional, ATA-133 IDE and UltraDMA-100+33 RAID controller. Along with the IDE RAID available with this board SATA RAID is available which can do up to ATA150 speeds. This motherboard also comes with 6-channel full-duplex integrated sound and an onboard 10/100 LAN port.

Specifications

  • Processor AMD Athlon™, Athlon™ XP, Duron™
  • Core Logic VIA Apollo KT400 Chipset + VIA VT8235
  • BIOS Award/Phoenix BIOS v6.0
  • Max. FSB 333MHz
  • Memory 3 x DDR SDRAM PC2700, 4GB max.Form Factor ATX

Expansion Slots

  • AGP 1, 8xPCI 6, 32-bit

Ports

  • PS/2 1 mouse, 1 keyboard.
  • Serial 2
  • Parallel 1
  • USB 4 onboard, 2 optional. USB 2.0
  • Network 1 x VIA Tahoe VIA VT6103 Physical Layer / Transceiver
  • Floppy 2 drives max.
  • IDE 2 x E/IDE Ultra DMA/133, 4 drives max.
  • RAID IDE 2 x Highpoint HPT372 UDMA/ATA 133 RAID, 4 drives max.

Controllers

  • Sound Realtek ALC650 6-channel full-duplex integrated sound
  • Option Silicon Image Sil3112a SerialATA

The EPoX 8K9A2+ is not your basic motherboard by any standard, this thing comes with a lot to offer. This motherboard like the KT333 from EPoX has the ability to go past 1.85v for the Vcore all the way up to 2.03v. The EPoX 8K9A2+ 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.

Special Features

  • Hardware Monitoring Function provided by Winbond
  • Keyboard Power On (KBPO)
  • Suspend To RAM (STR)
  • CPU clock settings are adjustable by BIOS
  • CPU V-core settings are adjustable by BIOS
  • CPU multiplier settings are adjustable by BIOS
  • Memory voltage settings are adjustable by BIOS
  • Wake On Lan (WOL)
  • P80P Diagnostic LED
  • Round IDE cables

The EPoX 893A2+ comes in the same style box that all of their other motherboards come in, with a handle at the top. I love EPoX motherboards and was really excited to take everything out to see what I got. The motherboard comes in an antistatic bag on top of a sheet of foam to keep it from being damaged by ESD (electro static discharge) which can damage computer hardware.

The EPoX 8K9A2+ has the standard green PCB color, EPoX doesn’t need a fancy colored PCB to make their board special though I do like colored PCBs. At a quick glance there are 6 PCI and an AGP 8x slot, 3 DIMM slots which will support up to 3GB of DDR400, and the northbridge is actively cooled. The back of the motherboard is nothing too special just the back of a motherboard, there are no mosfets on the back of this motherboard like their were on the 8K3A+.

 

The EPoX 8K9A2+ comes with a ton of extras along with the motherboard. You get a blue rounded IDE and floppy cable which is really cool because plain ribbon IDE and floppy cables are ugly. You get a serial ATA cable, game port header, and a USB 2.0 header which has 2 USB 2.0 ports on it.

This motherboard comes with a lot of documentation which is a great thing because the more information you have about the product and its features the better you can install, configure, and troubleshoot it if necessary. You also get a I/O panel to match the back of the motherboard, a CD which has motherboard drivers and Norton 2002, PC-Cillen, Norton Ghost along with a few other things, and 2 floppy disks which have the RAID and SATA drivers on them.

 

EPoX added a cool new feature to these motherboards which they call “magic light” it is basically the northbrdige heatsinks clear 40mm fan that has blue LEDs in it which light up when the motherboard is powered on. This fan looks really cool on the motherboard especially if you have a modded case with a window in it. I like this a lot because they are the first company that I have seen to offer something like this.

I went ahead and removed the heatsink from the northbridge and was a little disappointed to see that it had a tiny thermal pad under it. It would have been nice to see a good layer of regular thermal compound instead because this little thermal pad is not going to transfer heat well to the heatsink. I tried to get the thermal pad off for a few minutes but didn’t want to damage anything before I got a chance to test the board out. The northbridge markings are covered by the thermal pad but a guarantee that it was the KT400 chipset.

The EPoX 8K9A2+ 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 by looking in the manual.

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.

There are also 2 serial ATA connections which are controlled by the Silicon Image SATALink chip. These 2 serial ATA connections can be used with the new serial ATA hard drives that are coming out. Not only does this motherboard support SATA but you can also use it for RAID.

The bottom of the motherboard has a lot of jumpers which are used for many different things. Because there is no game port on the back of the motherboard where it usually EPoX has provided a header with a game port on it that you can connect to the motherboard and place in a slot on the back of your case. Right next to that there is a set of jumper for a blue tooth optional add on which can be used to connect the motherboard to any of your blue tooth devices. There is also of course the standard set of jumpers for your LEDs, switches, and PC speaker. I like these jumpers because they are clearly labeled and are separated so it is easier to install.

This motherboard uses the VT8235 southbridge which controls the PCI, ATA, USB, audio, LAN, serial, parallel, floppy, keyboard, mouse and SATA it connects all of these functions to the KT400 northbridge. One thing I do not like about this motherboard is that the DDR slots are too close to the AGP slot because I was not able to have an AGP card installed and change RAM. The only way to change RAM with this motherboard is to remove the AGP card. I did not have any problems with any of the capacitors being in the way of my Abit Geforce 4 Ti 4200 OTES which I will have a review of soon.

The EPoX 8K3A+ has a good amount of room around the processor and has holes for mounting heatsinks which require them. I like that the socket is horizontal and not vertical because when you install heatsinks onto the motherboard that are already in a case if the socket is vertical the power supply can get in the way. The ATX power supply connection is the standard 20 pin and is in a good place and not in the way of anything. There are two fan headers right around the ATX power supply connection which you can use for your heatsink fan or anything else.

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, next to that is the VIA chip for the Ethernet. The motherboard has optional SPDIF jumpers in between the chips which will allow you to connect to your digital devices like CD player, sampler or DAT. The I/O back panel is a little different than the standard layout, there are 4 USB ports along with the onboard LAN and 6 channel audio. You will more likely than not need to use the I/O plate that came with the motherboard on your case.

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 standard CMOS features section of the BIOS is where you can set the time, IDE devices, and a few of the other things for your system. 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 has a lot of options in it so that you can tweak your RAM settings out. 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, AGP fast write enabled along with AGP Master 1 WS Write/Read. The KT400 chipset is able to handle 8x AGP video cards so I will be using an Abit Geforce 4 Ti4200 8x 128MB I will have a review of this video card soon.

The Integrated Peripherals menu has all of the settings for the onboard peripherals. From the top level of the menu you can enable/disable the USB settings and set the first display device to AGP or PCI. Within the VIA OnChip PCI Device menu there are the options for the onboard LAN, and sound along with the ability to enable/disable the IDE RAID and the SATA functions which I would suggest you do if you are not using them to speed up boot time.

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. 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.

All of the overclocking features are within the Power BIOS Features section of the BIOS. From the top level of this menu you can enable/disable Auto Detect DIMM/PCI Clk, Spread Spectrum, Watch-Dog Timer, set the FSB, multiplier, abd DRAM type. The FSB can go from 133 – 255 which is higher than you will probably be able to reach and the multiplier can be changed from 6-13. The KT400 chipset is able to unlock the new AMD Thoroughbred CPUs via the BIOS without even unlocking the chip itself. This is the coolest thing I have seen in a while because if you have ever tried to unlock a XP or Thoroughbred its not an easy thing to do. The DRAM Type can be set to speed, 266, 333, or 400, I have mine set to 400.

This motherboard also has the ability to adjust the Vcore all the way up to 2.00v which is a lot more than most motherboard without doing a volt MOD. If you are going to go above 1.85v be careful because you will need some good cooling for the high voltage, watercooling or better I would suggest. You are also able to adjust the VDIMM voltage from the default 2.5v all the way up to 3.2v which will be more than enough even while overclocking. Before you crank up the voltage on your memory be sure that it can handle it and do it slowly don’t just go from 2.5v – 3.2v. I really like the fact that these voltage options are available because if you wanna do some serious overclocking you will need the high voltages and you wont even have to do a volt mod like you would have to for the EPoX 8KHA+

For all of the benchmarking I tested at 133 and 166 FSB to give a comparison because I don’t have another motherboard to test against right now. All of the memory settings were at the most aggressive settings and all of the resolutions were set to 640×480 to test the CPU rather than the video card. The 166FSB benchmarks are going to be a better not only because the FSB is higher but the overall CPU speed is higher as well. I will be using the following benchmarks: SiSoft Sandra 2003, 3DMark3002, Quake 3, and Unreal Tournament 2003.

SiSoft Sandra 2003 professional is the newest version to the very popular benchmarking tool. This program has a lot of different informational modules and benchmarking tools. The CPU benchmark will output the MIPS and MFLOPS of the CPU. Along with outputting the results it will show your results in comparison to other setups. With the 1800+ Thoroughbred B the ALU is at 2288 and the FPU at 5625. With the FSB at 166 the ALU is 2832 and the FPU is at 7026 as you can see there is a huge improvement in scores at 166 FSB.

Test Bed

SiSoft Sandra 2003 professional has another benchmark module for a multimedia test. This benchmark will output the Integer aEMMX/aSSE and Floating-Point results from your system. The results at 133FSB was 8883 and 8428. At 166FSB the Integer was 11084 and the floating-point was 10536, once again there is a huge gain in performance.

The last SiSoft benchmark I did was for the memory bandwidth. I used a stick of Corsair 512MB PC3200C2 with all of the speed settings at the fastest in the BIOS. At 133FSB the Int Buffered score was 1733 and the Float Buffered score was 1832. After setting the FSB to 166 I reran the benchmark and got a huge boost in my score. The int buffered was 2329 and the float buffered was 2482.

3DMark2003 is the newest benchmarking tool from Futuremark, it is very intensive and will stress your system to the max. Like I said before all of the settings were at the lowest quality and the resolution was at 640×480. I ran the benchmark at 133FSb and got a score of 2148, after upping the FSB to166 I got a score of 2324. There isn’t much of a boost in score on this benchmark but 3DMark2003 is more for testing video cards than motherboards.

Quake 3 is probably the most used game benchmark around the world and it will be used here as well. All of the graphical and sound settings were set to the lowest to stress the CPU as much as possible. At 640×480 with a FSB of 133 I was able to get 178.5FPS on demo001. After kicking it up to 166FSB I was amazed to see to see that I got 229.5 FPS.

Final testing was done with Unreal Tournament 2003 which is one of the newer and more stressful games. I used the standard benchmarking tool which was included with the game to do this testing so you would be able to more easily compare with the results. The benchmark does a flyby of the map and a bot match benchmark for each resolution. I only made a graph for the flyby because I felt the bot match benchmark was irrelevant because it is done in 3rd person rather than 1st person like the game is played. Again testing at 640×480 at 133FSB I was able to get 142.4FPS and at 166FSB I got 176.4FPS.

Overclocking with the EPoX 8K9A2+ was very simple and very impressive. 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 1800+ Thoroughbred to 1.780Ghz with a FSB of 200! All of the memory settings were at the fastest as well, 2-2-2-1CMD 4-way bank interleave.

I had to kick the Vcore up to 1.75v and the VDIMM up to 2.90v but that’s normal for overclocking and was simple because of the BIOS. The coolest thing by far about this motherboard as far as overclocking is concerned has to be the fact that it can unlock a B core Thoroughbred. No more do you have to mess with filling in the tiny gaps and connecting the bridges, just go into the BIOS and change the multiplier. I would have been overclock even more if I had put a watercooling system on this motherboard and cranked the voltage even more.

Conclusion

I have always loved EPoX motherboards because they offer so much and this 8K9A2+ is better than the previous boards I have used. This motherboard was able to handle 200FSB without a sweat. The BIOS has so many memory options and lets you change the voltages to very high levels. You can change the multiplier in the BIOS without even unlocking your CPU.

The board has 6 PCI slots, 8x AGP, tons of USB, IDE RAID, SATA RAID, onboard LAN, onboard sound, a great layout and cool northbridge fan. There are so many things about this motherboard that I like and so little that I do not like, the only thing I really didn’t like was the fact that a thermal pad was used on the northbridge and that the DIMM slots were too close to the AGP slot.

Both of these things are very minor issues and don’t even begin to take down the quality of this motherboard. Overall I am giving this motherboard a 10/10 and awarding it the OCmodshop Seal of Approval. I would like to thank EPoX for giving me this motherboard to review.

Pros

  • Awesome overclocker
  • Can change multiplier without unlocking
  • Lots of memory tweaking options
  • Vcore up to 2.00v
  • VDIMM up to 3.20v
  • 6 PCI with no CNR or AMR
  • Onboard IDE ATA-133 RAID
  • Serial ATA capable of RAID
  • Onboard LAN
  • 6 USB 2.0 ports
  • AGP 8x
  • LED fan on the northbridge
  • Great documentation provided
  • Rounded cables included

Cons

  • DIMM slots too close to video card
  • Thermal pad used on northbridge

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