Introduction.

Initial DDR SDRAM chipsets from VIA have not had the warmest of receptions, with many reviewers citing poor performance in relation to chipsets from rival manufacturers such as ALi, SiS and AMD. This criticism was notable for VIA’s first Socket A DDR offering in the form of the KT266. Luckily VIA took note of this criticism and worked hard to address the problem of poor performance, especially the issue of memory performance. VIA released their revised KT266 chipset onto the market in October and in the process re-named it to the KT266A.

Recent years have seen VIA release a number of “A” revision chipsets, with the most notable being the Apollo Pro133A, for the Socket 370 platform and the excellent KT133A for the Socket A platform. Both of these chipsets proved to be better than their forebears and have established a reputation of the best VIA chipsets being those which feature an “A” suffix. This process is once again happening as VIA are moving their DDR SDRAM compatible Pentium 4 chipset from being the P4X266 to the P4X266A.

Initial reception of the KT266A has been very good indeed with many reviewers stating that it offers a significant increase in performance over the original KT266. In fact many benchmarks show the KT266 being the first Socket A chipset to out-perform the AMD-760, which up until now was the fastest Socket A offering.

With this in mind, we recieved the Epox EP-8KHA+ for review in November 2001. In fact the EP-8KHA+ is a KT266A version of the EP-8KHA which we reviewed only three months ago.

As a result the EP-8KHA+ has a tough act to follow as the EP-8KHA is a very good board, with very high levels of stability. The EP-8KHA offered excellent expandability along with a very good design, which the EP-8KHA+ inherits.

Whilst the EP-8KHA+ is an upgrade of the EP-8KHA to the KT266A chipset, it is interesting to see that Epox have gone beyond just changing the NorthBridge controller. In many ways, this review will show how Epox took a very good, succesful design and enhanced it to be one of the best boards which we have reviewed at Processor Emporium.

To see how the EP-8KHA+ fared in it’s test, read on...

VIA KT266.

Essentially the VIA KT266A is an enhancement of the original KT266 chipset with an improved memory controller. Like the KT266, the KT266A features support for 133 MHz Front Side Bus operation (266 DDR), 3 GB of PC-2100 SDRAM and AGP 4X.

The South Bridge controller is the VIA VT82C686B chip which features support for U/DMA 100 Hard Drive support and also support for up to 4 USB devices to be attached. The 686B also provides support for an AC97 audio codec, a feature which is becoming increasingly popular with many new motherboard designs.

Specifications.