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133 FSB is the go! AMD and VIA Technologies have recently changed the Socket-A platform to a 133 MHz Front Side Bus in response to the challenge provided by Intel with the new P4. AMD have responded by tweaking and prodding their line of CPU’s by increasing the processor speed and by increasing the memory bandwidth with a higher FSB. A higher FSB is acknowledged to be the way to increase memory bandwidth and performance as it’s widely recognised that memory bandwidth is the latest bottleneck in the modern computer. Intel even did this a coupla years ago with the P3 ‘EB’ processors – so it’s a proven technology. VIA technologies have supported this move by AMD with modifications to the KT133 chipset. These modifications have produced the KT133A, which is certified to run at 133 Mhz FSB (previous KT133 chipsets would max out around 110 Mhz).

While I'm principally reviewing the Epox 8KTA3, I'm testing it with the newest Athlon available here in OZ (the 1.33 Ghz ‘C’ T’bird). The benchmarks I’ve included relate to the Athlon more than the mainboard, but I must say that I did not experience one crash with this mainboard. I don’t want to bog you down with details so there’ll be a limit to the number of words and graphs, just the main ones like Sandra, 3D Mark and Quake 3 Arena. These are not manufacturer review items either. This is a review of items bought and owned by the reviewer. Thus anybody could duplicate the results with little in-depth knowledge of BIOS RAM timings or such trickery and with easily obtainable information from the net.

The constants in the test are Windows 98SE (Win2k at the end just for interest), Corsair CAS2 RAM (128 mb – bought from Realtime Systems), Leadtek Geforce 2 GTS (standard clock settings), SBLive! Value, Seagate Barracuda 20Gb ATA66 HDD (7200 rpm). Video drivers in Win 98 were the new NitroSet 1.01 from Rizenet (just because I like fiddling), which combine files from the 10.80 & 11.01 beta Detonators (Rizenet's NitroSet 1.0 was used for Win 2K). VIA’s 4.29 final Beta 4-in-1’s were used for the mainboard drivers in Win98, while the native Win 2K drivers augmented by the Microsoft SP2 ‘Hotfix’ and ATA66 registry hack where used in Win 2K. DirectX 7a was used with Win 98SE and DirectX 8 was used with Win 2K. The BIOS settings were adjusted with the help of the great article at Adrian's Rojaks Pot.

All in all, a combination that could be built for about $2500 by shopping around the swap meets, and representing what a lot of OCAU members would have or like to have. The Epox cost me $230 and the Athlon was $455 (currently a bit higher due to a shortage of 1333 ‘C’ parts).

EPoX EP-8KTA3.
Epox are a newer motherboard manufacturer out of the giant Taiwanese semiconductor industry. While they haven’t the reputation of Abit or ASUS, they have been producing solid, reliable motherboards for a while. It’s with the introduction of the Athlon that they have upped the ante a bit and gone for a bit of overclocking pizzazz. The EP-7KVA was their acclaimed solution for Slot-A Athlons – even earning a gong from OCAU. The 8KTA series started the socket-A product line, with the 8KTA/8KTA2 using the KT133 chipset with either the 686A (ATA66) or 686B (ATA100) southbridge.

The EPoX EP-8KTA3 motherboard
"+" model shown has extra HPT370 RAID, review unit does not
click image to enlarge - borrowed from Epox.

The 8KTA3 utilises the KT133A chipset with the 686B southbridge (the 8KTA3+ has the addition of on-board RAID support). Thus we have support for 133 Mhz FSB processors, ATA100, USB, SDRAM and on-chip hardware monitoring. The expansion layout is also good with a 4 DIMMS/AGP/6 PCI/1 ISA set-up. No AMR riser is visible (waste of space). As is usual, there are two IDE channels supporting 4 devices. In addition, up to 4 USB devices can be connected, though a rear motherboard connector is supplied for only two of these. If you want more, you’re in luck, because Epox supply the plate and plug in outlets for the extra two.

The layout of the board is a mixture of mostly good with some not so good. What’s good is the rotational positioning of the CPU socket. In comparison to the ASUS A7V, for example, the HSF clip pulls down at the 3 o’clock position (ASUS is at the 12 o’clock position), which makes it a lot easier to use a pair of long nose pliers to unhook the clip (as us overclockers are want to do) and avoid the ‘crunched core’ syndrome. You’ll also notice that the power supply regulator capacitors are a reasonable distance away from the socket – good for humongous heat sinks. The main board power connector is also in a good position.

Also good is the DIMMS/AGP slot situation (usually have to remove AGP card before removing DIMMS because the retaining clips for the DIMMS hit the AGP card at anywhere more than the locked position) – with the Geforce 2 in the AGP slot, you can remove DIMM 1 quite easily. Not so good is the positioning of the IDE connectors. Where the IDE connectors are placed is the most inconvenient position – they are directly under where most people would put the HDD and FDD. More frustrating is that the second IDE channel is far enough away from the top of the case (where most people position CD-R’s, DVD’s, etc) that it’s a reasonable stretch to reach these devices with the supplied ATA100 cables – messy too. Unless you’ve got a few of these around, it’s back to the shop/swap meet to get longer ones.

AC97 on-board sound is provided which is quite suitable for general usage, given less than hi-fi speaker set-ups most boxes use.

The BIOS is an Award BIOS with all the options that we’ve come to expect of any board with serious overclocking pretentions. The highlights are adjustable Vcore, Vio, and AGP voltage settings together with CPU Clock and Multiplier settings. Also included are 4 way bank interleave settings for RAM as well as user definable CAS & RAS and DRAM Clock (100 or 133MHz). Change over from 100MHz to 133MHz FSB is achieved by a jumper on-board which alters the range for BIOS CPU Clock settings available. With the jumper in 100MHz FSB position, you get up to 124MHz available. With the jumper in 133MHz FSB position, you can get up to 166MHz FSB. The only drawback is the lack of 1MHz increments in the frequency settings (such as Abit & ASUS).

The construction of the board appears to be of good quality with a good package of extras included in the box. You get the floppy cable, 1 ATA100 cable, 1 ATA33 cable, extra USB ports, manual and driver disc. As well as the drivers for chipsets and sound, you also get PDF manuals, Acrobat reader and Norton Systemworks. Systemworks includes Norton Anti-virus, Norton Utilities and Norton’s Ghost (which I find of great utility – pun intended).

My experience with installing and running the board was very positive. The board proving to be very quick and stable when pushed. The lack of 1MHz increments was a frustration as the range I wanted to use had huge gaps ie. 136MHz to 140MHz to 145MHz with nothing in between.

All in all I would definitely recommend the board to everybody. It’s currently around the AUD$230 mark at the swap meets in Melbourne and is consistently $30-40 below the cost for the ASUS A7V133 and the Abit KT7. I’ve built a few systems around them with everything from Durons to big T-birds, and they really run well and stable. One interesting note: the chipset drivers supplied by EPoX for Windows 2000 do not utilise the VIA IDE busmasters. Some impromptu testing with Sandra indicates that the native drivers for Windows 2000 boosted with the Microsoft ATA100 SP2 ‘hotfix’ are still better than the new VIA 4-in-1s (v4.29). Another interesting point is that the drive index decreases (about 30% for ‘C’ to ‘G’ – if you’ve got that many) for partitions further away from ‘C’ – a consideration for Dual boot systems.

Agg note: I don't know that it's fair to compare this board, with no RAID controller, to the A7V133 which has a raid controller onboard (or the KT7A-RAID which I suspect is what Hagar found it $30 cheaper than). I'd be more inclined to compare it to the A7V133-C, Abit KT7A, IWill KT266 etc.. KT133A boards without RAID controllers. Having said that, a quick squiz around the usual suspects of online vendors shows the Epox to be definitely at the bottom end of that group price-wise.

1.33GHz AMD Athlon Processor.
The Athlon was the much prized AXIA stepping and was unlocked from the factory. Default is 133MHz x 10 at a Vcore of 1.75V. Looks like an Athlon, feels like an Athlon, goes like buggery! With only a small adjustment in the BIOS I’m flying at 1470MHz and Motherboard Monitor is showing 30ºC. I had to adjust the voltage up to the maximum of 1.85v to get it to that speed, but it appears to run reasonably cool with the FOP-38. However, my question is how accurate are these programs? A good example is that switching from an Epox 8KTA2 to an 8KTA3 (same Southbridge remember) produced a drop of 5ºC using the same version of MBM and the same CPU. A switch of MBM 5.05 to MBM 5.07 has produced a drop of 2-3ºC – work that out!

I mentioned earlier about the frustration of the missing 1MHz steps in the BIOS. Where I ended up at 1470MHz (140MHz x 10.5) was because the chip wouldn’t take 1522MHz (145MHz x 10.5) – the next step in the adjustments. The jump between 140MHz FSB and 145MHz FSB was too much. I couldn’t eek out a few more MHz above 1470 because I didn’t have the ability to go for 142MHz or 143MHz FSB. It would be nice if EPoX release a BIOS revision to allow me to do that (I believe that the new 8K7 with DDR and AMD 760 chipset does have 1MHz adjustment). I will be trying to squeeze a bit more out of it in the fullness of time (ie when I get a bit of time away from work!)

Benchmarking the system.
I don’t have access to BAPCO and Winstone etc etc and I think that some of them are superfluous anyway (who wants to know about how fast MS Word opens up? Do you run Photoshop or high-end MPEG decoders? I thought not!). The benchmarks I used are ones that anybody can download for free off the Internet or are readily available. All are well known and easily comparable. The results indicate that the Athlon is one fast "hunk o’ junk". I'm not comparing the board to any others because I don't have any others - however I think you'll agree it's no slouch. I tested the CPU at various speeds to show the difference that the speed increase made. The lower speeds were achieved by underclocking the CPU. I did have a 1GHz ‘B’ CPU to test with, but the differences were negligible, so I used the 1.33GHz processor for all tests.

3DMark2000

3DMark2001

3D Mark showed a smallish increase of between 5 to 7%, maybe indicating that the Geforce 2 was the limiting factor in D3D.

OpenGL Quake3 Demo1

In Open GL Quake 3, anywhere between 12 and 17% increase - possibly again due to the Geforce 2 holding the CPU back? The highest gain of 16.7% was at the lowest resolution, while the lowest gain of 11.8% was at the highest resolution - tending to indicate that the video card was beginning to max out.

Sandra 2001se CPU

Sandra 2001se Multimedia

Sandra 2001se Memory

The gains in SiSoft Sandra are what you'd expect from a nearly 47% increase in speed (the memory benchmark is independent of CPU speed).

Just for a laugh I used the old Quake II timedemo benchmark - 336.4 fps is not hanging around (640x480x16)! Of interest is the comparison of Win98SE to Win2K at the overclocked speed. It shows that Win2K is marginally faster in Open GL and D3D (DX8) than Win98 (DX7).

Conclusion
Was it worth it? Bloody Oath! I'd recommend the Epox 8KTA3 to anybody - its fast, stable and cheaper than the others. The main shortcomings are the placement of the IDE connectors and the lack of 1 mhz increments in the BIOS FSB adjustment. Both can be either overcome (with longer IDE cables) or accepted without great bother. Its pluses are its value for money and the speed and stability it displays.

Of interest is the comparison between Win98SE and Win2K. With Direct X8 it appears that Win2K is now a viable platform for the newer games. It even has a utility to allow it to emulate Win98 to allow games to install on it.

The Athlon is fast, but I now probably need to buy a Geforce 3 to keep up with it. Given the price, a 1 Ghz unit would be better value for money at around the $300 - 320 mark (especially the later steppings) - considering the modest increases in performance available with the 1.33 T'bird. However, the extra money is of little consequence if you can boast the fastest under the bonnet (purely for research mind you!). Now where can I get a cheap GeForce 3?