VIA KT133A Motherboard Roundup - June 2001

MSI K7T Turbo-R

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MSI was the winner in our November 2000 KT133 roundup, and their K7T Pro2 also earned our Editor's Choice Award for its outstanding performance and stability. So we of course had high hopes for MSI's KT133A solution, the K7T Turbo series. The board we received was the K7T Turbo-R, which includes the optional onboard Promise IDE RAID controller.

The K7T Turbo is based closely on the K7T Pro2 in terms of layout, but that board did not feature an onboard RAID option, so there were some significant changes made to the south side of the board, while the north part remains identical. MSI put the Promise controller in front of the fifth and sixth PCI slots with the two IDE connectors placed vertically in front of the controller. Although they don't block the PCI slots, the connectors may be too close to the bottom of the case when the board is installed, which might prevent the IDE cables from reaching the hard drive bays.

Regardless, the Promise IDE RAID controller supports both RAID 0 and RAID 1 configuration, like the Gigabyte GA-7ZXR (2.2). Interestingly enough, RAID 0+1 is again missing from the list, possibly to get a better deal from Promise on the actual chips by agreeing to include a slightly crippled BIOS.

Like the K7T Turbo, most of the overclocking features are available within the BIOS. One thing to watch out for is that the original engineering sample we received did not support the full range of CPU clock multipliers (5 to 12.5 in 0.5 increments). Instead, only multipliers higher than the default multiplier of your chip were selectable, which would be a problem when trying to lower the multiplier of your chip in order to raise the FSB. MSI has stated that a new BIOS would solve the problem, but we have yet to receive it, so make sure you check up on this before purchasing if it affects you.

The FSB speed ranges from 100MHz to 166MHz in 1MHz increments and is selectable within the BIOS, a nice feature that will help ensure that you can push your chip to its limit. Moreover, all the CPU core and I/O voltage options are also available in the BIOS so you can overclock easily. The only down side to the overclocking feature set, if any, would be the 100/133MHz jumper, which means that this board is affected by the KT133A Overclocking Issue.

Performance of the board was a little bit below average, but that's not the main focus of MSI. They have always focused on making sure their products are of the highest quality and stability, just as we found with the K7T Turbo. Together with the ASUS A7V133 and the Iwill KK266, the K7T Turbo was the third board arrived in our labs to survive 48 hours of our stress tests without crashing.

In short, MSI continues to live up to expectations with the K7T Turbo. Although performance and overclocking results were not the best here, MSI does continue to deliver high quality and very stable products to hardware enthusiasts.