Fyo - Re: "Paul: AtHWiper instability isn't FUD - it is the truth. ROFL! Yeah, spread the TRUTH Paul!
Pure FUD from the #1 FUDster."
Why do you call it FUD - when it is the TRUTH - widely known and widely admitted?
templintech.com
INTRODUCTION:
Via has done it again. After the lackluster reception the KT266 chipset received, Via of course went to work on an updated version of the chipset, just like with the KT133. With the revised chipset Via has given the competition something to aim for. The AMD 761 is an incredible chipset in of itself, but it just didn't seem to take full advantage of DDR technology, not that the KT266a chipset does, but it's a step forward in the right direction.
Epox has in my opinion the best motherboard utilizing the AMD 761 chipset; it is simply a dream board for all us overclockers out there with its stability and ability to run at extreme FSB speeds. Now with the release of the KT266a chipset Epox has once again entered the scene with a board that could once again be king, maybe. The question is can they keep up the high standards set by the 8k7a.....
There have been all kinds of bad press in hardware forums about problems with the 8KHA board. There is a confirmed problem that early boards had a boot problem when trying to warm boot the system. Epox has said that it is related to bad BIOS chips when in fact many people have stated that the problem persists even with the new BIOS chips, typically when running at high FSB speeds. Epox was quick to release a new revision of the board, 2.0 which supposedly fixed the problems- it didn't. My experience with this board didn't start out on a high note, I got one of the original revisions, 1.03, and it simply would not boot, it gave me a C1 error every time I powered it on. I was one of the lucky ones to get a bad board :(. My next board was one of the new revisions and it has the boot problems, every time I turn the system on it won't boot, I have to hit the reset button to get it to boot up. Hopefully Epox will find a fix for these issues or there will be a lot of unhappy Epox fan's out there that will be looking for a less problematic board, possibly in the Abit KR7 due out in a few weeks.
Update: After I wrote this part of the article I was playing around and came across something very odd. I noticed that if you used an AMD Athlon (non XP or MP) in the 8KHA the boot issues went away. I put my 1.33 in the board and it now runs flawlessly, no problems whatsoever with cold or warm boots. The only problem remains at high FSB speeds, the 8KHA+ simply is not stable at high FSB clocks, I get random reboots. Now here's where it gets interesting, after placing the AMD XP 1900+ into the 8K7A the boot issues arose. Now I have used that particular board for a few months now without a single glitch, and suddenly the exact same problem I was having with the 8KHA was now happening on the 8K7A. My theory is that the whole thing over the BIOS chips causing this boot problem simply isn't right. I spoke to an AMD rep a while back and he had said something about needing and AMD approved motherboard for the XP due to different power requirements that the XP needs. Though many boards will run the XP just fine, small issues may arise due to the fact that it isn't built to AMD specifications for the XP processor specifically. So I believe this is where all the problems are arising from, not the BIOS like people have been saying on the net. Of course this is all just my opinion and I hope that others out there will test this theory and let me know what they find here so that I can do an update to this review. Now I spoke to an Epox support tech and he told me that they have a few 8KHA+'s running with an XP1900+ with no problems at all, no boot issues or anything, even though the problem is obviously there he basically told me that my board should be fine, though different configurations will produce different results. I just hope this issue will be resolved soon enough...
On to the 8KHA+........
8KHA+ Specs:
Now I just one to touch up on some of the ammenities of the Epox 8KHA+, I'll keep this short and to the point :)
Supported Socket A Processors:
AMD Athlon, XP, MP
Duron
VIA Apollo KT266A AGPset
I/O Controller
1 Floppy drive controller
1 Parallel port (EPP, ECP)
2 Serial ports
USB Ports
4 supported onboard
2 additional as option
Award PnP BIOS
Flash upgradeable
120MB ATAPI floppy drive and ZIP support
Standard ATX form factor
305mm x 245mm ATX
UltraDMA-100 EIDE Controllers
Up to 4 IDE devices
Backwards compatible with PIO mode 3/4 & UltraDMA-66
200/266MHz Front Side Bus
3x DDR-SDRAM Slots for PC2100
1.5GB max. supported. Non-ECC
PS/2 connectors
1 PS/2 mouse, 1 PS/2 keyboard
6 (32-bit) PCI, & 1 AGP
AGP supports 1x, 2x and 4x modes
Extended Functions
Supports Hardware Monitoring Function by W83697HF
Supports exclusive KBPO (KeyBoard Power On)
Supports CPU Vcore setting via BIOS
Supports Memory Voltage setting via BIOS
Supports CPU Clock setting via BIOS
Supports STR (Suspend To RAM) power saving Function
Supports Wake-On-LAN Function
P80P Debug Card onboard design with LED display
Meet the 8KHA+:
Epox has taken the time to pay attention to some of the finer details this time around, the packaging for one is a much nicer this time than what the 8K7a arrived in, which was a more traditional package. The 8KHA+ is housed in a nicely designed plastic box with a pull-out tray that contains the board and other contents.
Here's that nice box:
The 8KHA+ comes with some IDE cables with a little added touch to them; they have clips on the sides to hold them firmly in place in the IDE connectors on the motherboard. The board also comes packaged with an extra USB expansion cable for 2 extra USB ports which gives the board a total of four, a copy of Norton Ghost and PC Chillin Anti-Virus software, basically the bare necessities, but it's the performance that count!
On to the board: The board itself has a nice layout, a little different from how the 8K7a was constructed. For one the socket itself has been rotated 90 degrees right which seems to give it more area around the socket itself allowing ample room to place a large HSF, and still have room to be able to attach the clip without hitting the powers supply or large transistors.
Epox has also come up with a different way to let the user know what's wrong with the board when it won't boot properly. It uses a small LED display to give off certain codes that correlates to a specific problem; there is a guide in the back of the manual that tells you what each code means. Believe me this is a VERY handy feature; no more deciphering beeps to track down a problem.
Of course with the good comes the bad. They're a couple minor yet frustrating problems with this layout. For one is the location of the DIMM slots in correlation to the AGP slot, if you have a large AGP card, like a GeForce card, then you won't be able to add or change memory modules out of DIMM 1 without first removing the video card because the card will be blocking the retention clip for the memory module.
If you look at the picture of the entire board up above you will notice where the ATX power connector is. You will have to run the power cabling around the HSF and tie it down to keep any wires from ending up in the fan blades, again nothing major just a little nitpicking. Another minor, but possibly damaging, problem is the location of a few transistors on the upper right part of the board, just right of the DIMM slots. They are so close to the edge that a CD-ROM drive or DVD player may come close to or actually touch them, with the possibility or bending them. My Creative CD-RW nudges them just a bit. So just be careful and don't push a CD-ROM drive into place with any kind of force just to be on the safe side.
8KHA+ BIOS:
One of the bright spots of this board is its BIOS. Epox has moved towards an almost completely jumperless free board, everything can be changed via the BIOS. The only exception is the fact that you have to set 1 jumper for either 100mhz or 133mhz operation, 100mhz is the default setting so most of you will need to switch the jumper before you begin. Everything else is handled in the BIOS, unlike the 8K7a on which there were jumpers for the multiplier, vcore, and DIMM voltage. Epox must be listening to its customers because the certainly made it even easier to play with system settings to get the most out of your system, it's basically the same as Abit's SoftmenuTM BIOS.
I will just kind of go through some of the more important features within the BIOS to give you an idea of what Epox offers in terms of options and ease of use. Another huge plus is that the manual is actually fairly in-depth this time around and can help you with some of the settings within the BIOS, unlike the 8K7a whose manual was, well, bare to say the least.
The main screen in the BIOS is your pretty basic front screen, but it's what lies underneath that makes it so nice and powerful.
Under the chipset menu you will find all the options you need to get the most out of your memory. Like the Abit boards you can select Normal, Fast, Fastest, Turbo, or you can set the different options manually to customize it to your needs.
Under the AGP menu you can set your AGP aperture size, which should be half your system memory, the AGP mode- 1x, 2x, or 4x, the drive strength of the AGP slot, which could improve performance, but at the cost of stability at higher AGP bus speeds, and you can enable or disable Fastwrites if your card supports it.
The PC Health menu is basically an informative screen which showing various system temps and voltages, it even shows the AGP voltage :) , but you can also set BIOS to shut down the computer at a certain temperature as a safety net in this menu.
The Frequency\Voltage menu is one of the most important for all you overclockers out there. Here you set the FSB (CPU Clock) of the system, and if your CPU is unlocked then you can change the multiplier (CPU Ratio). Of course the more you overclock the less stable the system will become, you can help that by upping the voltage to the CPU (vcore) and the memory (vDIMM). The vcore is adjustable in +/- .25 increments and the vDIMM is adjustable in +/- .10 increments. It's worth noting that the vcore is limited to 1.85v, even if you mod the CPU itself, unlike the 8K7a that topped out at an outstanding 2.15v. There is also no VIO control which would have been very nice to help get the most out of your video card, and lastly the vDIMM has a very nice 3.0v maximum, though I only recommend 2.8v for long term use, 3.0v would be very hard on the memory.
Benchmarks:
Now its time to get down to business and see how this thing fares when compared to it's little brother the 8K7a. I'll make use of a variety of tests here to try and get a complete picture of its performance and not just one area, like memory bandwidth or such.
The Testing platform:
AMD XP 1900+
Epox 8KHA+ (Via 4.35)/8K7a (AMD miniport 5.22& Via 4.35 IDE)
128megs Crucial pc2100
3DPower Morpheus GF3 (22.80 det's.)
Windows 2000 SP2
Netgear Ethernet Card
SBLive!
First up is SiSoft Sandra, this has become almost a standard synthetic test and as such I will be using it here to show theoretical memory bandwith.
Multimedia Tests:
..::SiSoft Sandra::..
8KHA+
8K7a
Integer
8752
8754
Floating Point
10089
10097
Memory Bandwidth:
..::SiSoft Sandra::..
8KHA+
8K7a
ALU
905
815
FPU
887
817
Well the 8kHA certainly offers up some nice bandwidth numbers, about a 10% gain over the AMD 761 chipset in my tests. Though it fell behind in the multimedia tests, I don't place much weight on that test- if any. It's a synthetic test that basically doesn't give a realistic picture of real world performance, as you will see later. UPDATE: One more bug that I have noticed since I wrote this article. If you use an AMD XP on this board you will see a drop in memory bandwidth compared to using an AMD Athlon. I got 981/928 using an Athlon 1.4, that's an 8% diference in the ALU and a 5% difference in FPU. When I asked Epox about this they didn't have an explanation, I just hope that all these issues will be resolved in a new revision.
Next up is Quake 3. To me this is one of the best benchmarks out there just because of the fact that it's a "real" world test. This is something that you can either play, or have a game that uses the Quake 3 engine, so its performance is something you can directly relate to. I ran all tests at their default settings and just switched between fastest/fast/normal/ and high quality. Since none of those are to dependant on the video card it shows off the rest of the systems performance nicely. The 8KHA+'s performance here is no less than amazing.
..::Quake 3::..
8KHA+
8K7a
Fastest
229.9
206.2
Fast
213.1
192.8
Normal
211.9
191.5
High Quality
205.3
187.8
Wow, the 8KHA just runs over the 8K7A in Quake 3, with an average of an 11% gain. I was extremely impressed with the 8KHA in its gaming performance.
Now we'll take a look at the two boards 3DMark 2000/2001 performances. Madonion.com's benchmarking utilities are my favorite tests by far. They combine the best of both worlds, synthetic and real world simulated tests.
..::Madonion's 3DMark::..
8KHA+
8K7a
3DMark 2000
10459
10204
3DMark 2001
7629
7275
What can I say here..............the 8KHA certainly has its voodoo working here. The 8KHA takes a very nice 354 point leap over it's little brother in 2001 and a 255 point gain in 2000. These numbers are really what have impressed me most with this board; it's an impressive performance leap over the 761 chipset.
Next up is WinAce Archiving. Let's see how well it can handle archiving a 109meg zip file. Time is in seconds, lower is better.
..::Winace::..
8KHA+
8K7a
109mb File
157sec.
173sec.
Once again it shows off its brute force in its ability to get those numbers crunched, a full 16 seconds faster than the 8K7A was. Windows also loaded noticeably quicker while using this board, which is always nice :)
Next up is Passmark's performance testing suite. This is another synthetic benchmark that attempts to simulate real world conditions.
..::Passmark::..
8KHA+
8K7a
Memory Mark
209.7
209.3
MMX Mark
352.5
354.9
Math Mark
297.8
310.5
I'm not sure how much weight to put into these or any other synthetic test actually. Again the 8K7A is able to come out on top in these synthetic tests, but it just doesn't reflect on real world performance as you have seen in some of the other tests, I think in my future reviews I'm going to rely on nothing but real world testing to hopefully show a more accurate picture of what you should expect if you had the hardware in your own computer.
Overclocking: This review just wouldn't be complete without mentioning the 8KHA+'s overclocking potential. I have seen a lot of success stories on the net of people reaching speeds of like 180mhz, and I'm sure that is the case, unfortunately the two boards I have had just didn't give those results. The first was bad, like I had said, and the second board just will not do above 160mhz- this is with proven components that would run extremely well at 175mhz on my 8K7a. At 160mhz the board was so unstable that it was useless to even try and run at those speeds, it would reboot randomly and that by itself was extremely frustrating to me. So I wasn't able to run any benches at a higher speed simply because the board would not complete them, it would reboot anytime I tried to run a test, maybe next time Epox will have such a great overclocker as the 8K7a, at the same time maybe I was just unfortunate to get a couple bad boards.
Conclusion:
Although this board does have some known issues with the XP processors, to me they are minor, except for the rebooting problem at clock speeds at or over 160mhz- that just cannot be looked over. What does impress me is the simple fact that this board delivers, at default clock speeds. It's kind of like that old saying, if you're gonna talk the talk then you have to walk the walk. Epox certainly talked the talk and walked the walk with the 8K7A, and though the talk is more like a whisper now Epox continues to do so with the 8KHA. This board is an incredible buy for those who want the best performance without overclocking. Epox has done a great job continuing the standards of performance set by the 8K7A, and I think it'll be interesting to see how Abit's latest creation the KR7a fares against it. Even if the KR7a outperforms it, the price difference just makes the 8KHA+ that much more appealing, but again I must say that those who want the best overclocking board will probably want to wait to see how well Abit's KR7a does since this board (at least the one I have) just isn't stable enough to call it a great overclocker. For those who don't overclock though the now basically jumperless design, incredible performance, and superb price makes this board hard to pass up.
PROS:
Price
Almost Jumperless design
Performance
LED POST debugging Display
CONS:
Boot issues when paired with an XP CPU
AGP card interferes with memory slots
Still no 1/5th divider (clock gen supports it, but chipset does not, Sandra could not confirm a working 1/5th divider)
Reboots randomly at high FSB speeds(160mhz)
After all is said and done I give this board a solid 7.5/10-due to the problems I have encountered with this board, again I may have just gotten a bad board |
