As I predicted several weeks ago a new chipset from VIA for AMD Athlon hit the market. It's not a surprising thing because KT266 wasn't consider as good as AMD761. I talked with several friends of mine and they all agreed that AMD Thunderbird is loosing the market share due to the new Pentium 4 aggressive marketing campaign. The AMD failure to compete against Pentium 4 in clock speed is understandable, after all the two architectures are not even comparable. Benchmarks revealed that Thunderbird is still a powerful CPU, but Intel was able to create a marketing image of the Pentium 4, the CPU of tomorrow. AMD failed to create the same image and they started to loose clients. With the latest AMD XP processor they done a very good thing if we think to performance, but the marketing was/is poor. They introduced once again the speed rating, proving that they haven't learned from previous experiences. Even if the 1800+ rated CPU is able to compete with Pentium 4 2Ghz and even more, most users will remember about the times when Intel was much better than AMD, the times when AMD used to speed rate their CPUs.
But today we will take a look at a very important part of a successful computing solution: the motherboard. VIA claims that KT266A is able to perform much better than KT266, meaning that the performance of AMD CPUs is indirectly improved.
The first company able to supply a production sample of a KT266A based board was Epox. Epox is known for high quality solutions and I am glad that the first impression on the chipset is based on a motherboard from a world wide recognized manufacturer.

First look

Epox packaging is known by PC Hardware readers and I won't insist on it. Inside the box you can find a user's manual, a floppy cable, a hard drive cable, an USB cable, a drivers and utils CD and an ATA33 cable. The motherboard we tested is rev 2.0, I don't know for sure but I think that's the same version which is available on the market. The motherboard's manual is very good; it describes the installation, BIOS features and functions and even provides backup and restore information. I think that Epox did a great job with this manual because there are no many user's guides on the market targeted to almost all users.
Let's take a look to the motherboard's layout. 8KHA+ features six PCI slots, 1 AGP and three DIMM slots. The expandability provided by this design is quite large. The memory limitation of most KT266 solutions is also over passed, but not totally; 1.5Gb is a lot of memory, but 2Gb would have been better. Around the CPU socket there is enough space to install one of the largest coolers available, Swiftech MC462, although at a first look it may seem that the space is quite limited. The KT266A chip is active cooled using a heatsink and a CoolerMaster fan. Thermal interface material was added to ensure the thermal dissipation. The board comes with onboard AC97 sound, but it doesn't have a CNR slot. The two 7 segments BCD used by Epox 8KHA+ provide enough diagnostic features to compete against many diagnostic boards. With about a hundred hexadecimal codes that can be displayed I think that this is the most feature rich diagnostic utility found onboard. There are two fan headers onboard, one close to the CPU socket and the other one near the case headers.
However there are several things I didn't like at the motherboard, the most important being the position of the ATX power connector. The IDE connectors position may also not be the best because these limit the air flow generated by the front case fan. The board also suffers from memory insertion problems due to the AGP slot position. However you won't have problems with most video cards because these are not so large to reach the edge of the memory slots.

Epox 8KHA+ product picture

On board there are two additional USB headers, but Epox supplied only one cable for one header. The USB headers position is good and the wakeup headers can be accessed even with the PCI cards in place, not very popular.
There are only several jumpers, a reason to think to a jumperless setup. Overall a pretty good layout which allows overclocking, but like always there are things that can be improved.