Overclocker Cafe - KT400 Mainboard Roundup

VIA KT400 Based Mainboard Roundup

EPoX 8K9A

Layout:

Six PCI slots just below the AGP 8X give you plenty of room to grow. The days of us having a PCI VGA card, two PCI Voodoo2s running in tandem, sound card, and a modem/NIC are behind us. With that in mind, I can't even think of a reason to have more than two PCI devices anymore. A six PCI configuration is the standard and with all the other kids doing it, why not?

One AGP 8X slot, purple no less, stands out and says Hey! You end up saying "HEY!" yourself when you see that with an AGP card installed, one of your DIMM retention clips is blocked in the closed position. The three DIMM slots each max out with a gig stick each.

EPoX like ABIT, caters quite a bit to the enthusiast market. In that, the little things show. One of these, is a space left open between the capacitors around the CPU socket to allow easier access when installing a heatsink.

The 20-pin power connector is also visible below positioned between the Northbridge and perpendicular to the I/O ports. Not too much in the way but not too much out of the way either.

The Northbridge cooler is a smaller passive number. Notice how the fins run perpendicular to the socket? This is to allow air to come off your heatsink and cool the Northbridge as we have noted before.

Three fan headers are mounted on the EPoX board for you. Two are above and below the ATX power connector with the third being placed at the bottom of the board, slightly to the right of center.