EPoX's thinking
The purpose of this section is to have a brief look at EPoX's KT600 board. We're not looking at layout in detail, rather we're researching just what kind of KT600 features EPoX have been able to implement in the 8KRA2+. This is a revision 0.3 board and may well undergo some rearrangement before final production.
6 PCI slots, IDE RAID, SATA, 3 DIMM slots, a passive Northbridge heatsink, no dedicated 4-pin 12v connector and a 3-phase power supply quickly sum up some of the features here.
A rather odd placement for the 20-pin ATX power connector. Those of you with short-ish PSU cables may well groan at its location. There are no mounting holes on this version. That may well be open to revision, of course. In-socket thermistors are still used, unfortunately. On the plus side, a passive NB heatsink, hiding the KT600, always gets our vote. ICS are used for clock generator duties.
Native SATA on a AMD platform, you bet. The SATA configuration screen shows a VIA 6420 RAID controller with 2 channels supporting 4 devices. Just how you will run Master and Slave SATA drives is a little difficult to answer. We reckon that a Silicon Image bridge will be used to power an additional 2 SATA ports, if the need arises. The PHY is there, so we may well see it being used on deluxe boards.
Before we get too excited about PATA, let's remember that the normal IDE ports have been pushed down. The purple ports on the right are fed by the Highpoint HPT372N controller, giving us independent, RAID0, RAID1 and RAID0+1 options. The useful debug display is welcome.
VIA's own 2-port FireWire controller is used as the SB doesn't have any inherent FireWire ability. The two white ports on the left are the ones used.
The clever jack-sensing ALC655 AC'97 v2.3 6-channel, S/PDIF-capable CODEC is the natural successor to the popular ALC650 that we saw numerous times over the past couple of years. The S/PDIF header is handily located on the left.
Pretty regular here. 4 USB2.0 ports are expected now.
