Manufacturer:
Price: $175



Introduction

Some time ago VIA released the successor to the very popular KT266 chipset called KT266A.  Due to a lack of strong chipset performance in it's predecessors, demand was high for this one. Especially in memory benchmarks, the earlier VIA chipset was getting it's bottom kicked by the others. That was one of the main reasons why AMD decided to keep their own chipset available to motherboard manufacturers. As you know, AMD released the 761 northbridge just to give 3rd party manufacturers enough time to come up with one of their own chipsets. When VIA released the KT266, people were a bit dissapointed because the AMD chipset was kicking the living daylights out of it and AMD had no other choice than to keep their own chipset in circulation.



Luckily VIA did a better job with the KT266A than they did with the KT266 and memory scores were up to speed with the competition. That's also the reason why AMD is no longer offering the AMD 761 northbridge as a solution for socket A boards with DDR support. EPoX, one of the best motherboard manufacturers currently around, has jumped on the KT266A bandwagon and released a KT266A right away. Being a pioneer sometimes means you are faced with buggy products that need several revisions to perform good and stable, but EPoX has proved with the 8KHA+ that being a pioneer can also mean being a succesful "entrepreneur".

With EPoX being the first manufacturer releasing a KT266A board, they are hoping to get a bigger market share in the motherboard market.  They'll have a street-length advantage on other manufacturers that are releasing their KT266A solutions around mid december. Should you wait for the others?  Or should you go out and buy yourself the 8KHA+? O² gave the board a run for it's money and comes up with the answers for your questions ...