EPoX 8KTA3+

EPoX 8KTA3+

Introduction

This is the second motherboard based on the KT133A chipset from VIA that AAPC has had a chance to look at. The KT133A supports AMD processors with SDRAM, and provides official support for front side bus (FSB) speeds of 133MHz. It is comprised of the VT8363A north bridge and the 686B south bridge.

It seems as if VIA did such a good job with this chipset that it is impossible to make a “bad” KT133A board; I have yet to see a wholly negative review of one. It has been hailed as an overclocker’s chipset, but the first board based on it that we tested, the ASUS A7V133, surprised us by overclocking well but not spectacularly. The real advantage of the KT133A, it turned out, lay in the memory performance, which was the best we had ever seen from SDRAM.

The 8KTA3+ comes from EPoX, another company from Taiwan, but much smaller than ASUS. Rather than having to design boards with broad market appeal, they can afford to be a little riskier and target niche groups. They were one of the forerunners of overclocking way back with their MVP3-based Super Socket 7 board, the EP-MVP3C, but we had kind of lost track of them since then. But lately EPoX has come back with a vengeance, with both their CU133A+ and 8KTA3+ getting rave reviews all around the net.