BTW, having gotten used to an Abit BE6-2 & a MSI Kt7Pro2A, both with a SoftMenu and totally jumperless, I'd have to say the Epox 8K7A wasn't any big deal, IMHO.
I was amazed at how nicely the manual described where the jumpers were and the placement/access to them is excellent. It also has a set of equally nice dip switches for adjusting the multiplier (or you can leave them set to auto-detect, which is the default).
The main benefit of the Epox right now is that as I've come to understand, it's currently one of the few if only mobos offering > 1.85V Vcore settings (ie., you can go to 1.9x & 2.0x volts without having to do any kind of mod). Also having the ability to independently set the voltage on the RAM is nice and seems to make a big difference in overclockability.
Another benefit is the most recent BIOS (dated 7/11), which is apparently allowing 1/5 divisor for FSB > 166! :Q I did flash with that BIOS when I put the system together yesterday, but I haven't been able to POST and stay up at anywhere near that speed (so far can POST ~150 FSB but windoze is flakey, even with multiplier dropped back to 7 or 8). I think my limitation may be my vid card - a sortof no-name AGP. Putting a decent PCI card in would probably help tons...
The main drawback is the amount of a voltage increase the jumpers provide, ie., 0.1V increments. I would have liked 0.05V or even 0.025V (like my Abit), for ultimate tweekability. Also, there doesn't seem to be a setting for the IO voltage, although many posts have indicated that this rarely seems to impact OCing to any degree.
Another drawback is that there's no way to manually set the AGP divisor that I can see. It seems to automatically set itself depending on FSB.
Oh welll... I'll settle for what I got!
