The Taiwanese motherboard maker MSI has lately proven to be a very reliable provider of excellent platforms, which can easily compete against the products of earth enemy ASUS in terms of performance, reliability, quality as well as special features. MSI's excellent performing, though still unreleased K7 Master motherboard with AMD 760 chipset has therefore been able to push ASUS from its throne of being the permanent provider of Tom's Hardware reference motherboards.
In case of VIA's Apollo KT266 it seems to go in the same direction. While Asus has still not got its KT266-product ready, MSI is already able to supply the press with reliably performing samples of its upcoming K7T266 Pro motherboard.
The K7T266 Pro is equipped very nicely. Its three DDR-DIMM slots can be equipped with up to 3 GB of DDR-memory. It comes with 5 PCI slots, one AGP-Pro slot and one CNR-slot. Besides the two ATA100 IDE channels provided by the VIA south bridge, you will also find a Promise RAID0/1 ATA100 IDE-controller, full cable support of the six USB-ports as well as a PC2PC USB-network connection. The BIOS setup of the MS6380 offers a wide selection of overclocking features, so that everybody should be pleased with this motherboard. With the board we used brand new and excellent performing PC2100 / CL2 DDR-SDRAM from Infineon, which performed at its best even at automatic settings.
We have not become completely unfaithful to Asus however, as we are putting up the A7V133 as our reference board with VIA's Apollo KT133A chipset against the two DDR-platforms from MSI.
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