Reply 20 of 21, by CharlieFoxtrot
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bracecomputerlab wrote on 2025-09-13, 22:54:VIA: It was VIA KX133 chip that had an issue supporting Socket A platform (Thunderbird), and perhaps due to this embarrassing "b […]
VIA:
It was VIA KX133 chip that had an issue supporting Socket A platform (Thunderbird), and perhaps due to this embarrassing "bug", VIA quietly discontinued the chipset.
Here is a technical explanation from EPoX about the debacle.https://web.archive.org/web/20010618053551/ht … sp?Article=1268
Initially, they were planning to call the updated (bug fixed) chipset that supports Socket A to be called KZ133, but someone knowledgeable about Nazi past must have intervened and got the name changed to KT133 before the release.
I claim that that was not the reason why VIA discontinued KX133. The actual reason is that Slot A platform was already almost dead when the chipset was released (development was behind schedule) and KX133 was introduced far too late to begin with. KX133 came out in early 2000 and KT133 (and Socket A CPUs) rolled out in summer of the same year.
KT133 is very close the same chipset as KX133. I have epox 7kxa rev 0.3 and it is really good board. It didn’t got stellar reviews about stability when released, but as usual, epox released several BIOS updates and in my experience, it is solid as a rock. I have 650MHz Pluto@800MHz running on it using GFD. This same story about often buggy bioses continued to sA era: manufacturers churned out huge number new boards constantly. Many of them didn’t ever get fixed, some manufacturers were better than others in this regard.
The Thunderbird was also really not an issue. Basically most KX133 motherboards support TBs up to 800MHz and many of them don’t support faster Plutos either. Fastest slot A Thunderbirds were also limited to OEM markets. Things moved to socket A really fast and Thunderbird on Slot A is pretty much a side note. And at least Asus K7V-T works with all Thunderbirds, so not all MBs were sensitive to fastest TBs.
