SUMMARY: While DDR is still in it’s infancy, Epox has been turning out some very fine boards using it. Take a trip with Sov as he takes us on a tour of one of their latest offerings; namely the Epox 8KHA. It looks like we may very well have a new winner for you right here!
Five years ago if I said the name Epox, you would probably have asked "Who?". Now, if you mention Epox, just about everyone knows who you are taking about. Epox’s most famous line of motherboards were the MVP3 PC100 Socket 7 line of motherboards supporting its own AGP 2x slot. What really put Epox on the map was to have the first Slot A KX133 motherboard out in the market two weeks before anyone else did. This sparked a lot of hungry Athlon Slot A users to buy Epox’s EP-7KXA motherboard. While this board did have its share of problems, it was a rather large success for Epox.
With AMD’s release of the Socket 462 CPU, Epox were first in again with the EP-8KTA. After the discovery of the L1 Bridge overclocking trick, Epox released the EP-8KTA+. It had the exact layout of the 8KTA, only with the ability to change the clock multiplier.
After VIA released the 686B southbridge with ATA-100 IDE support, Epox took its successful 8KTA+ and replaced the 686A southbridge with the 686B southbridge to add ATA-100 support. This board was given the title EP-8KTA2.
Again, VIA made changes to its line, adding the KT133A chipset with 266Mhz FSB support, and again Epox took up the initative with the 8KTA3 and 8KTA3+. The expansion layout of the 8KTA3 was almost identical to the 8KTA2. The major differences were the addition of a POST debug card, ATA-100 RAID (8KTA3+ only), an extra DIMM slot to make four SDRAM slots, and the KT133 chipset was replaced with the KT133A.
Now with the introduction of the DDR chipset, Epox already has two DDR motherboards for AMD Athlon; the Epox 8K7A and the 8KHA. We will be reviewing the latter.
