EPoX 8K9A+

John Gillooly unlocks the Athlon’s power with this new mobo.

Every so often a motherboard comes along that has a feature with the potential to change the way we look at those humble multi-layer PCBs that line our cases. EPoX’s KT400 offering, the 8K9A+, distinguishes itself with such a feature and manages to pack in some very yummy looking extras as well.

What got us lab dwellers so excited about this board is its ability to change the multiplier on any Athlon XP CPU. That’s right, no longer would we need to make Bennett don his magnifying eyeglasses, grab the silver lacquer and stop sniffing the superglue long enough to permanently join bridges and unlock our Athlon XP CPUs. Plus, the added bonus of having such a feature on a board that supports lockable PCI dividers and some insano frontside bus speeds is that you have what could be the perfect board for the Athlon overclocker.

As well as this BIOS trickery, the 8K9A+ also sports a range of extra features. It has both Serial ATA and Parallel ATA RAID ports onboard, both using separate controller chips rather than some sort of hybrid. This is the combination that we find to be the easiest and most flexible implementation of these technologies and is to be applauded after months of seeing confusing and often nonsensical combinations of ports; the most appalling being ASUS’ use of one SATA and one Parallel ATA port on it’s RAID controllers for some models of motherboards.

Other features include a LED POST readout onboard and even a chipset cooler with one of those LED-lit blue Perspex fans that have become so popular of late. If that doesn’t float your case-modding boat, then how about the fact that EPoX bundle the board not with pesky ribbon IDE cables, but nice pastel green rounded IDE cables.

EPoX has gone to a lot of effort to design the board and packaging with the enthusiast in mind, so we eagerly delved into our benchmarking. We tested with an Athlon XP 1800+ and 512MB DDR333. For comparison we tested against the ASUS A7N-8X, which uses the nForce2 chipset from NVIDIA and the ABIT AT7 MAX 2, which uses the same KT400 chipset as the 8K9A+.

The nForce2 and KT400 are neck and neck in the performance stakes at the moment, and the 8K9A+ does little to shake things up. It does however perform mighty close to not only the ABIT AT7 MAX 2 but also the nForce2-powered ASUS A7N-8X in all of our tests. In Quake 3 the difference is under 3% between the three boards tested and just over 3% in SYSmark2002.

While not differentiating itself in the performance stakes, the 8K9A+ delivers an amazing little package of features for the Athlon XP lover. With a BIOS chock full of tweaks, enough to satiate the most ardent tweakers and twiddlers, it appeals to the overclocking and high performance crowd, while the SATA and Parallel ATA RAID ports will make even the most picky of file storage nutters happy, while the glowing blue light on the heatsink caters for both small children and those easily impressed by light and movement.

So many mobos nowadays are built around a philosophy of cramming as many features in, however it is rare to see one so focused upon performance and tweaking as the 8K9A+. It is good to see that EPoX is staying true to its performance goals.