VIA KT600 chipset appears to be considerably more successful than its unlucky predecessor KT400A. A lot of mainboard makers have already adopted the novelty for their upcoming products, whereas the KT400A was welcomed very coldly. Following its competitors, today EPoX unveiled its EP-8KRA2+ mainboard based on the KT600 core-logic.

The specs of the novelty bring us nothing extraordinary except the fact that EPoX appears to be very popular among personal computer hardware enthusiasts, as a result, the EP-8KRA2+ promises to become wide-spread over hardware community.

• Supports all Socket A Athlon XP/Athlon/Duron processors, including Barton CPUs with 400MHz FSB;
• VIA KT600 chipset with VT8237 I/O Controller;
• 3 DIMM slots for up to 3GB of PC1600, PC2100, PC2700 or PC3200 DDR SDRAM;
• 6 PCI and 1 AGP 8x slot;
• 2-channel integrated ATA-33/66/100/133 controller;
• Additional 2-channel integrated ATA-33/66/100/133 controller with RAID 0, 1, 0+1 and 1.5 support;
• 2 Serial ATA-150 ports with RAID 0, 1 support;
• 10/100Mb/s Ethernet Adapter;
• 8 USB 2.0 ports;
• 2 FireWire (IEEE1394) ports;
• Integrated AC`97 6-channel audio solution with SP/DIF connectors;
• Loads of additional functions, including POST Port LED (error code display), Magic Health (reports the system status for every boot up to help detect faults early), Magic Flash (BIOS update in Windows environment), Power BIOS (overclocking and tuning) and so on;
• Overclocking and tuning functions, including CPU, memory, and AGP voltage adjustments, FSB settings with 1MHz step, adjustable FSB/DDR ratio and others;
• ATX Form-factor.

EPoX EP-8KRA2+ will make its appearance on the market quite soon. Additionally, a less advanced mainboard EP-8KRA2 without RAID capabilities will show up. Pricing may vary, but I am nearly sure that VIA KT600-based solutions will cost a bit less compared to those powered by NVIDIA nForce2.