Epox 8K9A+
This content was originally featured on Amdmb.com and has been converted to PC Perspective’s website. Some color changes and flaws may appear.
Another widely accepted and raved about KT333 motherboard was the Epox 8KHA series of boards. Known for their insanely high front-side buses, Epox boards are very popular among the overclockers on AMD Forums.com and they also have a niche spot on the list of highest Athlon overclocks. Can the KT400 chipset 8K9A motherboard keep the same results?The CPU socket on the 8K9A motherboard is fairly tight, but it does include the 4 mounting holes for heatsink installation that many are using. The capacitors are just too tight around the socket for it to be very friendly to the massive heatsinks that some are using. The DIMM slots do not interfere with the processor at all, however. The north bridge of the KT400 chipset is covered by a good heatsink and fan combination. The fan actually has blue lights in it that glow when the system is powered on. This will definitely add an aesthetic appeal to any system (with a window, that is!).
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The ATX power connector is placed in a cramped little area but it didn’t affect anything critical in the system. Just a tight squeeze to plug it in and out. Epox has a nice layout that includes the 8x AGP slot as well as 6 PCI slots as well as a ton of features for you to play with – I doubt if you would even need 6 PCI slots.
There are 6 ATA connectors on this motherboard: 2 from the VIA south bridge, 2 from the HPT 372 chip for IDE RAID and 2 Serial ATA RAID ports from the Silicon Image chip. That’s a lot! And if you can get Windows to handle it, they can all run simultaneously, too. Other features the board offers is Bluetooth (in another model of the board), additional USB headers, SPDIF output and of course the Epox diagnostic LED device. The external connectors on the board on the back panel are also very nice: 4 USB 2.0 ports, 6-channel audio and a 10/100 network port. Like I said, you should not need all those PCI slots!
The 8K9A motherboard continues the tradition of offering a solid bios with lots of options for overclockers. In here you can find the options for FSB modifications, multipliers, Vcore and Vmem. What you will not find is the ability to adjust the Vagp setting, which might be useful when troubleshooting those Radeon problems. One interesting fact that will be very exciting for potential overclockers is the 8K9A to overrule the multiplier on even a locked Athlon XP processor. That’s right, you can change the multiplier on any Athlon XP processor without having to do any pencil trick or close any bridges. This is interesting because this ability is built into the KT400 chipset and could be an option on any motherboard, given the proper bios implementation.
