Six Athlon Boards With The KT600 Chipset

MSI KT6 Delta (MS-6590): Bumper Equipment And Delivery Package

Board-Revision 2.0

Bios a6950vms.510 (07/25/2003)

Packaging to match with the MSI

A glance at the connections

MSI earned a lot of praise in previous tests, while also getting slammed with criticism from time to time by the THG lab in Munich. On the equipment front, the KT6 Delta is a bit of an oddity. Besides for well-known features such as Serial ATA RAID and FireWire, it even has Gigabit LAN. Besides MSI, only Soyo offers Gigabit LAN. The others rely on conventional 100 MB LAN.

The adjustable active Northbridge cooler and the three-phase voltage regulator features are worth mentioning. The core-cell chip enables the speed increases needed for overclocking. Bundled with the board is software to make adjustments under Windows XP. However, The colored connection pins are still not included - only MSI, Gigabyte and Epox offered them.

As for what is offered, MSI is the clear winner. The board includes three different slot panels with digital and analog audio ports, USB 2.0 and FireWire are included as are four Serial ATA cables and software. The complete package comes with a $147 (€134) price tag - putting the MSI in second place behind the Soyo in price terms. All the same, it all adds up in cost effectiveness, since you not only get good performance but many extras, too.