by Anna Filatova
02/13/2002 | 06:28 PM
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.<%BANNER[article]%>
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? :)
