Tuesday, June 19, 2001

Introduction

MSI has never been accused of lacking originality. For proof, one need look no further than their latest board - one that's based on the VIA KT133A chipset, and equipped with a RAID controller. The name of the beast is the MSI K7T Turbo, and it's the latest fully-loaded Socket A board to show up at our HQ. Let's take a look.

First off, it's important to note that the MSI K7T Turbo is based around the VIA KT133A chipset, and supports FSB frequencies of 133MHz and above as a result. This makes it thoroughly compatible with the latest generation of AMD Athlon CPUs.

Unfortunately, it can't take full advantage of AMD's processors, because it does not support DDR-SDRAM memory. User's will instead have to make do with conventional PC133 SDRAM.

On the upside however, the MSI K7T Turbo rendition of this board does come equipped with an integrated RAID controller.

Configuration

Configuration of the MSI K7T Turbo is accomplished - for all intents - from within the BIOS, as there is only a single on-board jumper relating to the CPU. JP17 can be used to force the FSB to 100MHz or 133MHz.

All other adjustments are performed from within the "Frequency/Voltage Control" menu within the BIOS.

From there, it's possible to set the FSB to a frequency ranging from 100MHz to 166MHz in 1MHz steps.

The clock multiplier setting can also set between 7.5X and 12.5X.

Vio and Vcore voltages are also adjustable, and can be set to values as indicated by the table above.

Finally, within the "Chipset Features Setup" menu, there also lies the option to set the memory bus frequency to either 100MHz or 133MHz, as well as tweak any number of memory timing settings. Please note that the Bank Interleave cannot be adjusted, and, if it is not allowed to be handled automatically by the "Serial Presence Detect" (SPD) system, a mild performance hit will result.

Next: Technical details.