Thursday, October 03, 2002

Introduction

Six years ago, EPoX was nothing more than just another name in the motherboard marketplace. Today, they stand shoulder-to-shoulder with industry giants ABIT and Asus, thanks to products with a high reputation for Overclocking. The innovative 8K5A3+ follows in that vein, and is based around the VIA KT333 chipset, which provides it with support for DDR333 memory, and ATA133 drives.

The 8K5A3+ also offers quite a few interesting features to it users. It comes, for example, with a Realtek ALC 650-based six-channel 5.1 sound-card, and a 10/100Base-T Ethernet controller in the form of a VIA VT6103 circuit.

The 8K5A3+ also comes complete with a four-channel, Highpoint HPT374 RAID 0+1 controller, with support for Hot Spare and Hot Swap technologies, thus providing an extra level of data security.
As a result of the presence of the HPT374, the 8K5A3+ can support up to twelve ATA133 drives to be connected to it simultaneously, if you include the four drives that can be attached to the conventional IDE controller.

The question is, did all of these new features come at the expense of Overclocking ability? That's one thing will be set to determine in this article.

In short, though, it looks like the newborn 8K5A3+ might prove to be as much of hit as its predecessor, the 8KTA3+.

So, without further ado, let's get down to the review.

Audio

The EPoX 8K5A3+'s audio circuitry is based around a Realtek ALC650 sound-chip. The ALC650 supports AC3, and 5.1 Surround Sound, and allows users to hook-in upto six audio channels, including a center base channel.

From a fidelity standpoint, the Realtek AL650 is quite good at what it does, and should satisfy most users.

Configuration

The EPoX 8K5A3+'s design is a Jumperless affair. Thus, user's need not fiddle with jumpers or switches in order to get their system up and running, but rather can pop into the BIOS to make any adjustments.

The "Frequency/Voltage" control menu, for example, allows users to change the FSB frequency of the CPU to a value ranging from 100MHz to 250MHz in 1MHz increments.

The clock multiplier value can also be set to between 6X and 15X.

Next, we have the Vcore and DDR voltages, which can both be altered to reflect any of the values indicated in the table above.


Finally, as expected, the "Advanced Chipset Features" menu allows a number of memory timing values to be tweaked, by accessing the "Dram Clock/Drive Control" sub-menu. Options include the ability to set the asynchronous memory bus frequency to 100MHz, 133MHz, 166MHz, or "SPD" (Serial Presence Detect), which allows the system to determine a proper frequency automatically.

Next: Technical details.

EPoX 8k5a3+