EPoX 7KXA KX133 Slot-A ATX

AnandTech Motherboard Rating

Performance

The 7KXA performs just about on-par with what we've seen from competing KX133 based solutions but most importantly it performs just as well as VIA's reference design did as it very well should.

The board gets an average grade in performance because it performs on-par with other boards in its class while not distancing itself from the rest of the pack with superior performance.

Price

EPoX introduced no major cost cutting measures with the 7KXA which should keep the board as the mark of an average priced KX133 based solution.

Granted that EPoX boards are cheaper than competing ASUS and AOpen solutions for example; but when compared to the majority of motherboards in their class, EPoX generally falls about midway between the more expensive and the cheaper motherboard solutions.

The 6.0 rating comes from the fact that EPoX consciously went with the VIA 686A South Bridge that integrates many functions into a single chip, thus pulling the 7KXA into a price bracket just below that of most AMD 750 based motherboards.

Stability

EPoX has never been known as a stability king, but then again they've never been known to produce boards that are simply unreliable. While we did test a revision 0.3 board, according to EPoX the board we received was finalized with the only real room for improvement being with the motherboard's BIOS.

While it is quite possible that some of the crashes during our nonstop 24 hour burn-in period could have been caused by issues related to the BIOS, overall we felt more comfortable running one of the more tried and true AMD 750 based boards we've had in the lab for the past few months.

Of course, perfection comes over time and EPoX is bravely just beginning with their 7KXA.

Quality

EPoX boards have always been above average in quality and their choice in components illustrates this.

The Slot-A connector was surrounded by 2200uF and 1200uF capacitors as well as other power-hungry areas on the motherboard, and EPoX didn't fail to adhere as closely to VIA's ATX reference design as possible in order to produce a reliable yet affordable motherboard.

The above average rating here reflects the EPoX quality that went into the 7KXA. While it's not comparable to some of the bigger manufacturers, for most users the board should be just fine.

Features

EPoX gets extra high marks here for including features such as an adjustable core voltage setting on the motherboard as well as adjustable FSB frequencies through the BIOS setup. It is a shame that more of the original Athlon motherboard manufacturers haven't adopted FSB frequency adjustment yet, but it is good to see that a newcomer to the Athlon motherboard market like EPoX learns quickly from their mistakes.

The KX133 chipset helps keep this rating high because of the 133MHz memory bus frequency support as well as support for 4 USB ports.

The single ISA slot can be useful to some users that do want to use their good old hardware ISA modems or other legacy devices. And since the 686A South Bridge has an integrated ISA controller, the cost of adding the ISA slot was next to nothing for EPoX.

Unfortunately some of the 7KXA's features are a bit on the useless side, such as < 100MHz FSB settings. In the features department, EPoX doesn't do bad at all.

Layout

The 7KXA is obviously one of the better laid out Athlon motherboards, the power supply connector is out of the path of the CPU which allows larger heatsink/fan combos to be used without any major restrictions on size.

The front panel LED and switch connectors are lined up in a very easy to access manner and are easy to mess with even while the motherboard is installed in a case.

Unfortunately what limits the EPoX here is the fact that three of the five PCI slots cannot accept full length cards, but on the bright side, how many desktop users really have more than two full length PCI cards in their systems?

Retail Availability

EPoX gets a bit of a trampling in retail availability since it is easier to go out and buy an ASUS or even an ABIT motherboard than to come across the latest product line from EPoX.

Documentation & Software Bundle

The 7KXA's User's Manual was disappointing to say the least, what saved EPoX in this category and gave them a slightly above average score was the inclusion of Norton Ghost which can be a very useful utility for making backup images of your hard drive(s).