The mainboard manufacturers started paying more attention to additional features of their products lately, other than those implemented in the chipset. You will hardly be surprised to see that a mainboard features integrated hardware sound, RAID or USB 2.0 controller. However, EPoX managed to think out something really interesting: the company will provide some of its products with HPT374 IDE RAID controllers supporting not the usual two, but four ATA/133 IDE channels.

The first mainboard with this controller onboard and hence boasting 6 IDE channels altogether will appear EP-8KHA3 Socket A mainboard based on KT266A chipset (VT8233A South Bridge supporting ATA/133). The picture of this mainboard has been recently posted by PCParadox, you can find it here.

The specs of the new solution look as follows. The board will be designed in ATX form-factor, feature 4 DIMM slots for up to 4GB PC2100/PC1600 DDR SDRAM, 5 PCI slots, an AGP 4x slot, 2 ATA/133 channels, four-channel ATA/133 HighPoint HPT374 RAID controller, 4 USB 1.1 ports (+2 optional ports). The board also features standard EPoX’ overclocking friendly opportunities. The solution looks really not bad, the only thing I wonder about is who may need so many IDE channels? :)