Introduction.

Just over a year ago we had the pleasure of reviewing Epox’s first venture into the FC-PGA motherboard market with the excellent EP-3VCA. Now just over a year later Epox have returned to Processor Emporium with their latest offering for the Socket A motherboard market with the EP-8KTA3+.

Epox in recent months have built up a reputation for making a range of fast and stable AMD Athlon and Duron compatible boards in the shape of the EP-8KTA, EP-8KTA2 and EP-8KTA3. Built upon VIA’s well received KT133 and later the KT133A chipset, the Epox Socket A range has managed to win praise from virtually every web-site which has reviewed their boards.

Recently the EP-8KTA3 has lead the Epox range into the market for KT133A based boards, but Epox decided to place another board at the top end of the market for PC enthusiasts in the shape of the EP-8KTA3+. Where these two boards differ is that Epox have decided to follow a recent trend for building boards with an integrated Highpoint HPT-370 RAID controller. The Socket A market currently has two contenders in the RAID enabled board market in the shape of the Abit KT7 RAID and the Asus A7V RAID, it appears that Epox wants to gain a chunk of the enthusiast market.

Unlike the EP-3VCA which we reviewed last year, the EP-8KTA3+ is a board which is designed specifically for the PC tweaker in mind as it has a whole raft of BIOS settings which enable users to tweak the board for optimum performance.

As ever at Processor Emporium, we like to see user choice in board settings this must not be at the expense of overall stability. The EP-3VCA last year proved that Epox boards can deliver stability comparable to other class leading motherboard brands, so we had high expectations of how the EP-8KTA3+ would perform throughout this test.

As with any board submitted for review at Processor Emporium, the EP-8KTA3+ faced a tough task. To see how it fared, read on:

VIA KT133A.

The KT133A is the latest revision of the existing KT133 chipset which we saw in the Aopen AK33 and Ak73 reviews. The main addition with the KT133A is the support for AMD’s latest Athlon processors which make use of the new 266 MHz Front Side Bus (133 MHz DDR). Like the older KT133, the KT133A still features support for now standard features such as PC-133 SDRAM, AGP 4X and U/DMA 66/100 Hard Drives.

Like recent KT133 boards, all KT133A boards make use of the new VT82C686B South Bridge controller 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.