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I like Athlons. They're fast. They're cheap(ish). They're helping undermine a monopoly. However, I don't own an Athlon system. Why? Because until now, the range of Athlon-supporting motherboards has been fairly dismal. I, like many, have been holding off my Athlon purchase until motherboards with a few more features, a touch more speed and a lot more stability hit the market. Well, things are looking up for folks like me because VIA have released the much-anticipated KX133 chipset and manufacturers are scrambling to produce motherboards around it. The first to ship to market is the Epox EP-7KXA.

click for bigger pic

Eagle-eyed viewers will have spotted the name "EP-7KVA" on the big picture. According to the website, the board was originally called that (presumably V for VIA?) but is now called the EP-7KXA. Someone in marketing got promoted (or fired) I guess.

In this review I will make regular comparisons to the Asus K7M. This is partially because it's the Athlon board with which I have the most experience, but also because the K7M is an extremely popular Athlon board - in many people's opinion, the flagship motherboard for AMD's 750 chipset and hence the Athlon itself. If you're interested, you can read my review of the K7M here.

Who are Epox, I hear you ask? They're not as well known as some other Taiwanese manufacturers, but they've been in the market for a while, quietly cranking out motherboards, modems and more recently cell-phone accessories and pagers. This board is their first Athlon-based offering, and is the first of theirs I've actually laid hands on. I have to say I was pleasantly surprised..

Why have we been eagerly anticipating the KX133 chipset? Well, let me list a few features of this board and see if you get the idea:

• UDMA/66 support on all IDE ports
• AGP 4X support
• Asynchronous memory bus (run memory at FSB+33MHz if you like)
• 4 USB ports
• FSB adjustable to 100, 110, 115MHz (and a few speeds below 100MHz, oddly)
• 5 32-bit busmaster-capable PCI slots
• AMR slot
• On-board AC97 sound

Not all those features are direct features of the chipset, of course. My feelings about on-board sound remain unchanged - it's an additional cost built into the board which many people will disable and install "real" sound cards. However, many other people will be content with the on-board sound and see it as a selling point of the board.

The first thing that struck me about the Epox board was the huge expanse of space in front of the SlotA connector. Major kudos to Epox for thinking ahead - this is the obvious first comparison point to the Asus K7M - that board is infamous for the terrible placement of the power-supply connector. Epox have sensibly moved it off to one side of the SlotA area, made sure there's no badly located tall capacitors (as in the Asus P3C2000) and left acres of room between the SlotA and the RAM slots. Even mounting the monster VOS-32 ducted cooler on this board leaves all RAM slots free and the PSU connector accessible. This is great news for overclockers and, to be honest, even people who are leaving their CPU's at default speed. There are apparently people who still do that. I read about them somewhere.

Due to the AMR slot, there's a fair bit of room between the AGP and the first PCI slot. This gives you some leeway for mounting big chunky coolers on your video chipset without blocking PCI slots. 3 DIMM slots allow for a maximum of 768MB PC100 or PC133 memory. It has wake-on-keyboard, wake-on-lan, IR-header and the usual other connectors onboard. The 4 USB ports (2 internal, 2 external) is unusual and a nice addition.

Hardware monitoring is fairly standard - the VIA VT82C686A allows for CPU core temperature and system temperature (via an optional thermister, apparently, as the BIOS reports 0 C) reporting. 3 fan headers (2 intelligent) are provided. There are a few interesting BIOS features such as the mysterious "Press Alt-F2 to load Award Flash" message on bootup. I couldn't find anything in the manual but I presume this will automatically load a new BIOS image from diskette and flash it to the EPROM. This saves you having to boot off a floppy or booting to a DOS prompt before flashing. There are loads of tweakable options in the BIOS, no doubt a couple of FPS could be gained by the persistent twiddler but fortunately Epox have included a "Load Optimal Defaults" option which pretty much takes the hard work out of it for you. One odd thing is the "Frequency/Voltage Selection" menu which has no mention of voltage at all. In fact, the voltage is set using dip-switches on the motherboard. Otherwise it's your fairly standard Award BIOS.