I have received a lot of emails since my MSI K7T266 Pro-R review. Almost all readers asked me if buying a VIA266 or AMD761 motherboard in this moment is a wise decision. We reviewed both a VIA266 and a AMD761 mobo in the last month and we concluded that the VIA266 based MSI K7T266 Pro-R performs better than the DFI AK76-SN. But these two motherboards come from different market segments; the price difference between DFI and MSI mobo is not very important, but the target is surely different. Today I will take a look to a motherboard which can be a competitor to the K7T266 Pro-R and more importantly it's based on AMD761. So we will be able to compare two different motherboards targeted to the same market segment but based on the different chipsets. I hope that in the end I will be able to answer to your questions about the legitimate of an upgrade to DDR. This motherboard I'll review today is made by a company new at PC Hardware but well known world wide for their products quality and performance. I personally know Epox motherboards from quite a while but this is the first review of an Epox. Let's see what they can do :)

First look

The Epox 8K7A+ motherboard is shipped together with a manual, a RAID BIOS manual, one CD with drivers and the IDE and floppy cables.

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The manual is not as good written as expected from a manufacturer like Epox. It describes the installation process but it fails to offer more detailed information and sometimes the information is a little bit confusing. The mobo comes with 6 PCI slots, one AGP and NO ISA or CNR. In my opinion this is the best slot configuration available today, but it surely depends if you have an old ISA card. The mobo comes with two memory slots and a memory support up to 1Gb. This is disappointing; if you plan to use 8K7A+ in a server the maximum memory size isn't enough. I liked that the memory modules can be installed with the AGP card in place, that's a good thing since most motherboards suffer from this problem. The motherboard is well organized and may look strange because it uses four MOFSETs in the voltage regulator, but unlike most motherboards these dissipate power on individual heatsinks.

Other manufacturers prefer the cheaper solution of placing transistors on the board surface. Epox uses instead four transistors which are placed on the board back surface as seen in the right picture. We will see how this Bi phase voltage regulator is able to handle the power requirements of a high frequency operation. Around the socket there is a lot of space for large heatsinks and even more it's easy to install them, no bad placed capacitors to make this job hard. I was about to forget the onboard HighPoint 370 RAID controller ( the same used by Abit boards ). So you can use up to eight IDE devices with this mobo. I liked the position of the AGP connector which doesn't incommode the CPU heatsink, but you should take care when you route the power cables. Like most motherboards on the market today 8K7A+ has onboard sound, but fortunately the BIOS can disable it. ).

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The AMD760 is active cooled by a heatsink and a fan. I was happy to see that Epox used thermal paste to maximize the heat transfer between the core and the heatsink. The AGP slot use the new AGP retention mechanism which is more easier to use than the previous mechanisms. I think that someone got inspired to use a mechanism like the one build to hold the DIMM memory.

Epox 8K7A+ product picture

There are several jumpers and a DIP switch onboard which suggest a hardware CPU setup. Epox boards weren't very popular among overclockers but lately it seems that Epox is trying to do the best in order to raise the motherboards overclocking features. To increase product reliability Epox uses a very interesting Debugging feature: two seven segment led digits allow the user to track motherboard problems. Of course that you have to keep the manual handy in order to realize what these want to tell you but it's one of the best debugging features ever seen. Overall the motherboard impressed us: solid build, good layout.