EPoX 8KTA3+

The Candidate

The Specs

Bundle

In the 8KTA3+’s very stylish box come the board itself, floppy, ATA/33, and ATA/66/100 cables (one each), an additonal 2-port USB connector, the driver CD, a High Pont driver floppy, and three different manuals: the complete manual in English, a condensed, multilingual (Chinese, German, French, Spanish, Italian) manual in the form of a pamphlet, and a RAID guide.

Most of the manual is merely adequate, with only the most basic instructions on how to install the board and configure the BIOS, and with a fair share of incomprehesible English (“Any tend or improper way to replace the BIOS are prohibited,” page 3-5). 

However, the last few pages of the manual, with their detailed instructions on how to install the drivers and use Norton Ghost, as well as the separate RAID manual are excellent and very useful.

The CD has everything you need: all the drivers, EPoX’s own RAID Administrator software, Norton Anti Virus 2001, and Norton Ghost 5.1. The inclusion of Ghost is particularly imprtant, as it is much easier to “ghost” your operating system onto a RAID array than it is to install Windows onto one directly.


Extras

The Box This is the first time I have ever considered commenting upon the box that a motherboard comes in. I gaenerally don’t care about what a box looks like, I only care about what is inside. But the 8KTA3+ box is really nice. The external part is made of a kind of translucent cardboard, and the inside part can be slid out to view the contents easily (the static free bag containing the board is clear as well). There is a rope handle at the top of the box, and you might even use it to carry your school books around or something. The whole package is very classy and stands out prominently on storekeeper’s shelves.

HighPoint 370A chip The 370A is the brand new revision of High Point’s ATA100/RAID chip. I first heard about it at CeBIT in March, and didn’t anticipate its appearance in the channel until next month at the earliest. I was pleasantly surprised to see EPoX integrate it into their products so quickly. The HPT370A is not however all that I had hoped to see from this chip revision. It does not address any of the compatibily and performance issues we have seen from the HPT370. In fact, the only thing that the revision actually fixes is Suspend-To-RAM functionality.

686B South Bridge This is the latest south bridge chip from VIA. It controls the PCI slots, using what VIA calls the "Super-I/O Integrated Peripheral Controller." The most important aspect of this chip is that it provides support for an extra 2 USB ports, as well as for ATA/100 (which its predecessor, the 686A, did not).

Onboard Sound For me, onboard audio is for the most part a non-issue. I will not a praise a motherboard for featuring it, nor will I condemn a board for lacking it. I will merely inlcude it as an “extra.” As AC’97 audio is pretty much the pits, anyone investing the time in building their own system would do well to invest in a halfway decent sound card as well.