The thought of starting the weekend w/o my 'puter was too grim. So I bought the only locally available M/B I could find on Saturday, an Abit KX7-333. Paid premium for it too. Contrary to what I had read on the web, it accepted all 3 sticks of my crucial DDR ram, and I am able to run them at cas2 and at the 150 FSB, though I have to detune the other memory settings somewhat to run Prime95 "torture test" w/o error. Pretty good for unregistered unbuffered ram !
Nice board to have to settle for in a pinch. Runs a bit cooler and w/ better 5v values than the damaged Epox. Since I have the part and it looks doable, I think I will have a go at soldering in a new ATX plug to resurrect the 8KHA+. But probably only for a non or minimally overclocked setup. It was a great board, but the voltage problem was definitely its achilles heel. Shame on Epox for that design flaw! :|