EPOX EP-8K7A

[DietDrThunder]

<Taps playing> Last night I booted up for the last time the first PC I ever built (shortly after joining Anandtech), and it booted into Windows XP flawlessly. It was born 5/17/2001 and the parts consisted of:

1) EPOX 8K7A motherboard,
2) AMD Thunderbird 1.2GHZ CPU (then updated in 2004 with an AMD Athlon XP 2400+ Thoroughbred 2.0 GHz CPU) ,
3) 1GB of Crucial DDR SDRAM (upgraded to 2GB),
4) 3DFX VooDoo 3 Video card (Upgraded to an ATI Radeon All-in-Wonder Video card),
5) 30GB Western Digital 7200 RPM Hard Drive (Upgraded to a 120GB WD HD),
6) Pioneer 16X DVD Burner,
7) 3 1/2" floppy disk reader,
8) 3COM 10/100 NIC PCI Card,
9) a Sound Blaster Live PCI Sound Card
10) a generic ATX case with power supply bought at Fry's
11) a PS2 Keyboard and mouse.

I pulled the hard drive this morning and took it to Goodwill for recycling. It was preceeded in life by a Commador 64, a Tandy TRS-80, an IBM PS2 model 50Z, and a generic 486 PC bought from Computer Warehouse.

12/6/2017 will be marked by me as a sad morning. May it rest in pieces </Taps Playing>

 

[VirtualLarry]

I think a machine of that era, used DDR, not DDR2, but otherwise, farewell, good friend. I wish I still had my Athlon XP system.

 

[UsandThem]

Epox made some great boards. It kind of sucks that so many of them went out of business, as there was a real incentive for the companies to provide a good product and good service.

Epox, Iwill, Soyo, AOpen, Abit (not a fan), DFI.

And somehow Biostar survived

A blast from the past:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/845

 

[VirtualLarry]

And somehow Biostar survived

LOL!

 

[UsandThem]

LOL!

Seriously. Out of all those companies, how the heck did they survive? Low-end boards were PC Chips and ECS, and then you had all the other companies above them, but I don't think I ever saw anybody say "Hey man, you should totally buy a Biostar board because they are a great choice!". It just blows my mind....

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

Now, now, I still have some of their mobos in service, and rather like them actually
A few TZ77XE4s, a TZ77XE3, and a few TA870+s.

 

[UsandThem]

Now, now, I still have some of their mobos in service, and rather like them actually

I stand corrected. There's a first time for everything..........even finding a Biostar fan

 

[Thunder 57]

Ahh Epox. I do miss them. The first PC I built (with my own money) had an Epox 8K5A2+. That was a fantastic board. I later upgraded to an 8RDA3+ IIRC. I really liked those boards. During those years I was also dealing with MSI, Biostar, and ASUS for friends/family. ASUS was overpriced and I would've taken Epox over any of them.

It was sad to see them go. I remember reading that apparently some of their people formed Supox. Nothing seemed to come from that though, although they apparently do exist.

I've only had two motherboards since my last Epox (A64 variant of some sort). I had an AM2 Gigabyte which I used for 4-5 years and served me well. Now I have an ASRock that I really do like. The Gigabyte was pretty good. It was a little flaky when I put a Phenom II X4 in it, but that got resolved. It couldn't overclock even more than maybe a few MHz, though. That was because it was an nForce 570 chipset and not one of the new, good, AMD ones.

My current ASRock has really impressed me, especially for the price. I'm looking to do an overhaul sometime next year (running a 3570k) and I'm going to look at ASRock first. I will look at what else is out there, particularly Gigabyte. I'm curious as to what the "good"/popular mainboards are these days.

 

[UsandThem]

I'm curious as to what the "good"/popular mainboards are these days.

Well the Asrock Taichi boards across multiple platforms seem to be quite popular on these boards with builders. I have a Z270 version, and it's a really nice loaded board. But of course each manufacturer has a couple of boards that stand out above the rest.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

I stand corrected. There's a first time for everything..........even finding a Biostar fan

Heh, not a fan per se, just that they do have some mobos that aren't PCChips level horribad
Now I AM a fan of AOpen, ABIT, DFI and EPoX. RIP

 

[RLGL]

I had a Biostar, it lasted about 2 months. Its replacement (rma) lasted 30 days as did its replacement.
I had 2 Abit IP35 boards, the longest lived one was about 2 years.
I had a Soyo board it lasted a little over 2 years. I was going to replace the memory in it, the case was opened up and suddenly like the 4th of July sparks came flying out as did some of the magic pixie dust. A very short postmortem put that one in the trash.

 

[Iron Woode]

I've only had two motherboards since my last Epox (A64 variant of some sort). I had an AM2 Gigabyte which I used for 4-5 years and served me well. Now I have an ASRock that I really do like. The Gigabyte was pretty good. It was a little flaky when I put a Phenom II X4 in it, but that got resolved. It couldn't overclock even more than maybe a few MHz, though. That was because it was an nForce 570 chipset and not one of the new, good, AMD ones.

nforce 570 chipset was in my MSI K9N Platinum. That was a decent board but bad caps killed it after 2 years. Same with my Epox 8RDA+.

 

[Gardener]

Yes, I purchased the positively-reviewed Epox EP-8K7A for a build for a family member, within two years it was flaky and upon inspection the capacitors looked like fat, swollen maggots. I ended up replacing it with a Fry's ECS $40 board, it ran fine for another five years.

The notorious "batch of bad capacitors" era.

 

[Thunder 57]

nforce 570 chipset was in my MSI K9N Platinum. That was a decent board but bad caps killed it after 2 years. Same with my Epox 8RDA+.

Sounds like you had bad luck. Or maybe I had good luck? I don't think I've ever had a motherboard die on me. One or two with friends/family maybe, but rather rare.

 

[larciel]

Epox, Iwill, Soyo, AOpen, Abit (not a fan), DFI.

And somehow Biostar survived

You just called all of my old friends.! Damn I miss the days!!

 

[richaron]

EPoX 8KHA+ of around the same era was the mobo I really cut my teeth with overclocking. These boards were very open to tinkering and CPUs of those days had minimal (no?) thermal protection. I literally smoked 2 CPUs experimenting around. Cost me a lot of money but I learnt a lot of lessons on that board.

 

[PingSpike]

Seriously. Out of all those companies, how the heck did they survive? Low-end boards were PC Chips and ECS, and then you had all the other companies above them, but I don't think I ever saw anybody say "Hey man, you should totally buy a Biostar board because they are a great choice!". It just blows my mind....

I've actually owned several Biostar boards and still have one. None of them ever died on me (sold the majority of them) and they had pretty extensive bios options. The earlier ones had what I could call "questionable" layout designs and all of their bioses could be considered byzantine but I liked them. They're usually on the cheap side too. Its true they don't really have any ardent fans.

Lots of people love MSI but outside of video cards all my MSI motherboards were flaky. As in, I've purchased a number of MSI motherboards over the years and every one of them had some wrong with it.

 

[PingSpike]

Only Epox board I ever owned was the EP-9U1697GLI. I had that Asrock939-dual sata2 board first. It used that awesome ULI M1697 chipset and I loved it so much when I retired that board to my wife's PC and got the Epox one with the same chipset only it didn't have AGP as I didn't need it anymore.

That asrock board was amazing though, I still sometimes wish I didn't sell it even though it would probably have been collecting dust for years by now. AGP and PCI-e in the same board, shit on the nvidia chipsets that were considered top performers before the ULI chipset burst on the scene and it even had an upgrade card slot. Installed that in there and converted the board to slot AM2/DDR2 mostly so I could keep using that cool board. They don't make awesome transitional motherboard like that anymore.

 

[PingSpike]

You probably should have pulled that Voodoo3 card and ebayed it though. IIRC those things have started to go up in price big time recently.

 

[Ratman6161]

I think a machine of that era, used DDR, not DDR2, but otherwise, farewell, good friend. I wish I still had my Athlon XP system.

I think I actually have enough parts in old boxes in my crawl space to actually build such a system. I know I have an Athlon 64 X2 motherboard and cpu stuffed in a box somewhere. Every once in a while i get nostalgic and think about assembling all that old junk into a functioning system just to see if I could make Windows 10 run on it...just never seem to get ambitious enough.

 

[DietDrThunder]

I didn’t realize how much nostalgia this thread would bring. Now I feel bad for giving it to Goodwill for recycling.

 

[krose]

Lots of good memories in this thread. Anybody ever have a Soltek board?

 

[tcsenter]

Lots of good memories in this thread. Anybody ever have a Soltek board?

I had the Soltek SL-63AV+. IIRC that was the model, anyway, but I believe I also had one other Soltek model which I forget now. I always liked the very clean and balanced layout done by the Epox design team.

 

[lukart]

Epox made some great boards. It kind of sucks that so many of them went out of business, as there was a real incentive for the companies to provide a good product and good service.

Epox, Iwill, Soyo, AOpen, Abit (not a fan), DFI.

And somehow Biostar survived

A blast from the past:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/845

Loved the Epox mobos! Such fun days vmodding and pll wiring
I think probably thats why they went out of business... so many overclockers trying to hard mod their stuff, I guess their RMA was too high.
Now use mainly Asrock stuff, they are supper overclocking friendly and very robust.

 

[SPBHM]

I had the 8rda+, it was a good board, but the caps were of bad quality.