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Introduction:
AMD
is quickly rising in the market today due to their
high performing cpu's with aggressive pricing.
AMD had to rely mostly on chipset maker VIA for
producing chipsets for their AMD processors. The
first Thunderbird chipset released was the KT133
which is basically the KX133 transformed into
a Socket 462 (A) interface and gave support for
AMD's Athlon Thunderbird and Duron Spitfire. The
KT133 brought support for 100MHz DDR(200MHz) processors
and gave the Socket A processors its first home.
While AMD was able to ramp up clock speeds up
to 1.2GHz easily and surpassing Intel's Pentium
III, performance still did not improve much due
to the limitation of the Athlon's FSB at 100MHz(200MHz
DDR) compared to Intel's 133MHz.
The
C-type Athlons started appearing but it is a well
known fact that the KT133 cannot reach high bus
speeds. More often than not, the KT133 maxes out
around 108-115MHz fsb. VIA then released a new
chipset called the KT133A. What is it? It's a
KT133 with support and capability to run 133MHz(266MHz)
fsb. With this, AMD no longer needs to ramp up
clock speed but can simply run faster at the same
clock speed due to the increased front side bus
speed. It is a well-known fact that AMD processors
limited by their front side bus speed. The KT133A
sports the new VT8363A northbridge and has upgraded
the southbridge from the VT686A to the VT686B
which basically adds ATA100 support from the existing
ATA33/66 of the VT686A.
While
not as famous as the likes of Asus and Abit, Epox
is a company that delivers very good and solid
products for a lower price. Epox has been very
successful with their VIA-based motherboards and
an example of which is their KX133 board dubbed
the Epox 7KXA. This time around, Epox releases
their KT133A board called the 8KTA3. It also comes
in a RAID version which is the 8KTA3+. Epox boards
aren't really known to be the flashy type but
rather they go with the simple and effective design
and this also helps reduce costs.
Specifications
CPU
AMD
Duron 600-900MHz and Higher (200MHz fsb)
AMD Athlon 700-1200MHz and Higher (200/266MHz
fsb)
Chipset
VIA
KT133A Chipset
VT8363A Northbridge
VT686B Southbridge
Memory
Four
168-pin DIMM sockets support PC100/PC133 SDRAM
Supports 1.5GB Max
Bios
Award Modular Bios 6.00PGN
Expansion
1 Universal AGP4X Slot
6 Bus Master PCI Slots
1 Legacy ISA Slot (shared)
2 Additional USB Ports via USB bracket
Onboard
Peripherals
AC97
Onboard Sound
Hardware Monitoring
Onboard P80P (Power on Selft Test Display)
Bios
and Layout |
