Written By:
Date Posted: June 10, 2002

The Layout

    Lets first look at one of the most important areas of the board, the area around the CPU socket.  First let me state that my Alpha 8045T heatsink fits on this motherboard.  The CPU socket area where the slugs for connecting heatsinks are protected by some special tape which makes sure that no damage is done to the board if your screwdriver slips while putting your heatsink on.  We can also see the thermal sensor in the socket which doesn't hold out much hope for a reading from the internal diode of the Athlon XP series of processors, and it has been confirmed by Epox that it doesn't contain support for the internal diode.

    Lets also look at some of the other layout choices made by Epox.  

    The power connector is placed in a bad position as you have to snake the power connector around the heatsink.  The KT333 northbridge is covered by a passive heatsink which helps reduce the amount of noise  produced and is one less piece of moving hardware that could break.  The heatsink doesn't get warm to the touch even when the FSB was overclocked.  The 3 DIMM slots when opened can block part of the AGP slot.   The AGP slot itself has a locking tab which does help keep the video card in the slot.

    The IDE connectors are placed in an awkward position, especially if you have a long AGP card.  The extra IDE connectors, which makes a total of 8 UDMA-133 connectors, are courtesy of the Highpoint 372 controller and are placed at the bottom of the board.  This placement of these connectors is far from ideal as if you look at the layout of the Abit KT7-RAID it has placed all the IDE ports under the DIMM slots which isn't in the way of anything else.

    Otherwise the layout is rather nice with a 6/1/0 (PCI/AGP/ISA)   configuration.  There is also onboard audio which unfortunately for the revision of board I have (1.0) is only 2-channel AC-97 sound.  The south bridge is the VT8233A which adds support for ATA-133 hard drives that the VT8233 south bridge of the KT266/KT266A didn't support.  There is also only two jumpers; the always nice CMOS clear jumper, and a useless 100/133 FSB jumper.  The POST Port while smaller than on the 8KHA+ is very helpful in helping diagnose problems as it shows what the problem part is, and is easier to read than MSI's D-LED system.

    If you would like to see how the onboard Highpoint controller works, I direct you to VoOdOo's review of the Abit KR7A-RAID which uses the same controller.  I didn't notice any difference between this controller and the Highpoint 370 on the Abit KT7-RAID.  Though one point of interest, I have had a very hard time running Highpoint controllers in Linux (Mandrake 8.1/ Caldera 2.4 etc.) in the past, so be warned that you may have to disable the onboard RAID controller if you want to boot Linux.

    The only difference between the KT333 and the KT266A chipsets is that the KT333 officially supports DDR333 (obviously), and should really just be called the KT266B.  In fact if you wish to compare the two click here.   Well after looking at the external looks of the board lets move inside.  The next page will thus discuss the BIOS features of the board.

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