EPoX 8KTA3+

BIOS and Overclocking

The first BIOS section you’ll want to look at is “Standard CMOS Features,” where you go to make sure all your IDE devices are properly detected. (Devices controlled by the HPT370A chip are not shown here. They are detected by that chip’s own BIOS later in the boot process. There is no option to disable the HPT370A altogether.) You will also want to take a look at “Advanced BIOS Features” to make any adjustments in the boot order. “PC Health Status” is also useful to check how hot everything is running and how much power your devices are getting.

Standard CMOS Features	Advanced BIOS Features	PC Health Status

A more important screen is “Advanced Chipset Features.” This is where you go to adjust your memory settings, and EPoX has provided a pretty decent selection of settings. Disable “DRAM Timing by SPD,” set your DRAM clock to the appropriate number. It gives a choice of either 100 or 133, but this actually means Host clock or Host clock+PCI (or 4/3 Host clock). Choose the appropriate “SDRAM Cycle Length” (the CAS2 latency; either 2 or 3), and be sure to set “Bank Interleave” to 4 bank. Enabling 4-way interle is the single easiest way to improve SDRAM performance. In this menu, you can also set the appropriate AGP mode and enable AGP Fast Write.

The most important screen is “Frequency/Voltage Control.” This is where you can adjust the front side bus speeds and multiplier factors that determine your CPU speed.  It is also where you adust the CPU’s Vcore voltage, the I/O voltage, as well as the AGP voltage. This last setting is will be especially useful to all those who overclock their AGP cards.

Frequency/Voltage Control

It is with the frequency adjustments that the JP5 jumper becomes crucial. When this jumper is in the 1-2 position, the BIOS gives you FSB choices of 100 to 120 in increments of 1 or 2. When in the 2-3 position, you get the additional choices of 133 through 165. If that were the end of the matter, it would be inconvenience enough. However, the 8KTA3+ will not post with Durons or 100MHz Athlons with that jumper in the 133 position.

I tried this with with a 1.2GHz Athlon and a 700MHz Duron that are capable of 133MHz and beyond, but they would only post with the jumper in the 100 position.

This left me with 120MHz as the maximum possible FSB I’d be able to reach, and a dilemma as how to benchmark the board. I certainly wasn’t going to be able to compare the results with those from the A7V133, where I used 133MHz as the baseline. I finally decided to approach it as a KT133 board: after finding the maximum possible multiplier with the FSB at 100, I proceeded to bump the latter number up as high as it would go.

All things considered, the 8KTA3+ overclocked the Duron quite well, getting up to 884MHz at 8.5x104, with the memory at 138. It didn’t fare quite as well with the Athlon, however, getting only as high as 1.272GHz at 12x106, with the memory at 141.