Late Vintage: High Degree of Maturity of the KT133

MSI K7T Master (MS-6347)

BIOS Version: 1st September 2000

Board Revision: 1.0

The K7T master (MS-6347) from MSI is excellently suited for workstations and servers. With IEEE1394/Firewire and Ultra160-SCSI interfaces integrated in the board, it clearly offers additional value on top of the normal connections. The tuning possibilities of the K7T master have, unfortunately, not turned out to be as plentiful as with the MSI K7T Pro2. Thus, the CPU clocking speed can be changed from 100 to a maximum of 150 MHz, but the Vcore voltage, on the other hand, cannot be varied. The BIOS update in the current version 1.1 of September 2000 eliminates problems with the ATI Rage 128, driver problems with the nVidia GeForce MX and problems in the energy saving mode. Flashing the BIOS can, with due caution, only be advised.

The K7T master has six PCI slots and one CNR slot addition the AGP Pro port. It offers the user plenty of room for future expansions in this area as well. In contrast to the other test candidates with 3 DIMM slots, the board is equipped with 4 DIMM sockets that can tolerate up to 1.5 GBytes. However, when using double-sided SDRAMS, only either the plug-in place 3 or 4 can be used. Concerning the other accessories supplied, the K7T master from MSI includes a connection cable with a slot cover for two fire wire ports as well as an LVD-SCSI cable with four ports.