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Epox EP-8K7A or IWill KK266 ? help me choose one to buy...

W

whistleclient

Platinum Member
trying to decide. I've heard that the kinks haven't been worked out of the DDR boards and sometimes run slower than KT133a variants.

help me decide...
 
Epox 8K7A

Just put one together.

No kinks. No problems. And its faster then the KT133A chipset. My benches are about 8% higher then a friend who got the KT133A mobo with SDRAM.

DDR isnt more expensive anymore, and it does outperform SDRAM even if it is by a fairly small margin. But the price diff you are looking at between a DDR setup and an SDRAM setup is like 40$ at most. Worth it for the DDR in my opinion.
 
Does the Epox have the 3-phase power design like the abit and iwill boards? Remember a while back the abit engineers insisting that 3-phase would be necessary for stability with high clocked athlons. They were probably full of it though........
 
Epox only has 2-phase power thingies which is bad I guess. But honestly, do you know the diff between a 2 phase and 3 phase thingy? I sure as hell don't!.

If nothing else, I think the epox because it has a AMD northbridge. I have had no problems with that, which is good. I am sure future procs will also like the epox over the IWILL because of the extra bandwith DDR gives.
 
The extra "phase" that a 3 phase board has mostly just makes things run cooler on the mobo. The current is split among 6 MOSFETS instead of 4 on a 2 phase board, so they run a little cooler. The Epox is a two phase board, but they put some pretty mean heatsinks on the MOSFETS, so it is not to big of a deal unless you have a case with bad airflow. Both 2 phase and 3 phase boards should handle the Palamino just fine, and they actually will run at a lower voltage than current thunderbirds...like 1.4v I believe. The 2 phase power supply of the Epox is high quality though, so it should work just fine. The Palamino will benefit more from DDR due to the hardware prefetch feature of the new core. This new feature should better utilize the bandwith that is offered by a DDR based system. Hope this explains things a bit.
 
"AMD recommends 3 phase PS for the Palomino's and probably for future Athlons as well."

They do? Where does it say this? It is my understanding that even the motherboard manufacturers are not sure of the requirements of the Palamino's yet. Could you please provide a link to this info..🙂

 
I have an 8k7a and it rocks! Rock solid and a good overclocker from what I read here on the forums. Haven't tried bus speeds higher than 133 yet. 😉
 
i'm using my iwill kk266r right now. it rocks. the only thing is that it is near impossible to get the ram in place. other than that, no compatability/stability issues here. And i have a SBlive card.
 
Man with DDR Ram so cheap right now.. why get PC133? Go for the Epox. I put together a couple of KK266's nice boards. Onboard sound not too shabby either. If you already have PC100 ram you might want to look into the Abit KT7E.. & save $$ (buy a better Video Card!)
 
Honestly? Get both and build them, and decide which to keep and which to return 🙂 I've got several KK266 boxes and I just finished a new box with an EpoX 8K7A+ ... A very solid, reliable, overclock-friendly board for sure. I like the AMD north bridge, still despise the VIA 686B south bridge (the only option right now, short of ALi which sucks major arse).

If I had to build a new system right now, I'd say 8K7A all the way. I love my Iwill KK266 machines, they are rock solid and all run 166+ FSB. Yet they are already outdated, for all intensive purposes. DDR is the future, like it or not. EpoX has a great board in the 8K7A.
 
I have an Iwill KK266 and I hate it!

This POS is so unstable. When I get BSODs in Win2K, the computer won't boot until I unplug it and reset the CMOS and take out the battery. Now, I'm trying to install some stuff from CD and the POS keeps crashing all the time causing me to got back to point one again.

Here is a site that has stuff about the KK266 and some of its problems, all of which I am experiencing now.
 
My iwill is stable, except one thing. The usb ports have their problems like all kt133a boards. They just shut off, especially annoying with mouse and keyboard on them. I got to find better.
 
No USB problems on my KK266-R..even @ 165 FSB. It's the most stable board I have ever used. The 3-Phase power is not needed to support the Palomino. The Epox 8K7A with it's bi-phase design officialy supports the Palomino with the latest bios. I have both boards and they are both very impressive, but if you are building a new system now, the price of DDR and SDRAM are the same, so DDR would probably be a better choice.
 
About 2-phase power, you can see an article here

I am going to buy an ASUS A7V133 - it´s popular here in Brazil...

Unfortunately, DDR is not popular here yet...
 
DoggieDog to me it sounds like you need to back your chip off a little bit. I was experiencing what your complaining about and i was pushing my chip too hard. Backed it off and its stable as hell with Win2K. Has nothing to do with the board, has everything to do with operator error from the sounds of it....
 
I got both boards and they are both pretty damn good. THe 8k7a seems to overclock better though. ALso the Iwill will no work with Radeons stabaly for some weird reason. THe Epox wouldn't work with any RAm in teh second DIMM slot so i had to return it, i'm getting another one monday. One nice feature of the Epox is the extra USB slots and also the diag LEDs are nice. But the multipliers require dip switches instead of being fully soft like the Iwill. Unless you have lots of high quality SDRAM, go with the Epox.
 
Thanks for the advice PreDatoRWuZHerE.

I don't really think I am pushing my chip too hard though.

I've got a 1Ghz AXIA week 14 @ 1.333Ghz with an Alpha PAL6035 and Sunon fan going along with the case that is wide open. My heat levels are around 51C. Plus I haven't OCed anything other than the multiplyer.

But Iwill give it another shot and back off a bit 🙂
 
I just got another Epox and this one is much better than the first one i have. The RAM slots work perfectly now. I'm building another athlon comp so i'm going to try an Asus A7M133 (or was it A7V?). ANyways the only thing about the epox is that it doesn't like to work well with multipliers being over 10X if the chip is defaultly 10X and under. So most of the overclocking has to be done with the FSB, which may or may not be a problem.
 
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