Friday, August 24, 2001

Introduction

Following shortly after its introduction of the KT133A, VIA released the KT266 chipset. When it hit the market, its improved performance and versatility over the KT133A made it an easy choice for inclusion in EPoX's EP-8KHA motherboard. At this point, EPoX already has an established reputation for designing high-performance products geared for the Overclocking crowd. With the EP-8KHA, they seem intent on maintaining that reputation by offering a mainboard that's replete with features.

So, let's skip on down to the analysis, and see what EPoX has whipped-up this time around.

Configuration

The EP-8KHA's design can easily be defined as Jumperless, since only a single on-board jumper relates to the CPU. Said jumper - JCK1 - can be used to force the FSB to operate at either 100MHz or 133MHz.

All other configuration settings are accessible solely from within the BIOS.

Adjustments pertaining to the CPU can be made from within the "Frequency/Voltage Control".

Once there, users have the option of setting the FSB frequency to between 100MHz and 200MHz in 1MHz increments..

The clock multiplier can also be set to between 6X and 15X.

The Vio and Vcore voltages are adjustable, and can be set to values as indicated by the table above.

Finally, as expected, a number of memory timing settings can be tweaked or altered from within the "Advanced Chipset Features" menu, which includes the ability to set the memory bus to 100MHz, 133MHz, or to SPD (serial presence detect).

Next: Technical details.