Review - EPoX 8KRA2+ VIA KT600 Motherboard

Benchmarks

Futuremark 3DMark2003 (patched)

Futuremark 3DMark2001 Second Edition (patched)

Futuremark PCMark2002

Return to Castle Wolfenstein - IXBTDemo

Unreal Tournament 2003 Demo

Nvidia Treemark Complex8 Demo

Novalogic Comanche4 Demo

Content Creation 2002

Business Winstone 2001

SiSoft Sandra 2003 Pro Final

Overclocking

EPoX had the enthusiast in mind when they designed the 8KRA2+. The BIOS lets the user overclock the FSB in 1 MHz increments up to 250 MHz and play with a nice range of CPU multiplier clocks. Voltage tweaks include VCore and VDIMM adjustment. The VCore selection ranges incrementally from 1.45 to 2 volts, and VDIMM scales from default to 3.2 volts in .1 volt increments. We noticed that when the FSB is overclocked to, say, 220 MHz, the memory speed misreads during POST as 400 MHz DDR, when it is also indeed running overclocked at 440 MHz DDR. More importantly, the DDR RAM frequency can be run asynchronous with the FSB, so one does not necessarily have to own PC3200 DDR RAM to run a 200 FSB AMD processor. For example, the Athlon XP 3200+ CPU will run at 200 MHz FSB, while PC2700 RAM will run at 333 MHz DDR. Utilizing this last mentioned feature, we briefly overclocked and ran a couple benchmarks on the overclocked 8KRA2+. The motherboard ran stably with the Athlon XP 2600+ (2075 MHz) successfully running at 2200 MHz (10x220 MHz FSB), while still using default memory and CPU voltages. The system loaded Windows at 230 MHz FSB, but benchmarking became unstable and crashed the system. We will not publish official benchmarks as we believe with better memory, we could have obtained better results.