MSI K7T Turbo Socket-A KT133A ATX

Introduction

The KT133A was only released about a month ago, but this market is already heating up. Over the past week we have looked at the solutions from ABIT and EPoX, and we concluded that they are both very impressive, each with their own unique features, and both deliver decent performance and stability. It seems that motherboard manufacturers are putting forth a lot of effort in order to capture more marketshare.

There are several reasons why the KT133A market is so popular these days. For starters, AMD processors are quite good for overclocking and relatively inexpensive. In keeping with those themes, the KT133A chipset serve as a very affordable and mature solution for everyone. Further, it allows users to stay with their SDRAM rather than going out for some DDR SDRAM and from a motherboard manufacturer’s perspective, designing a KT133A motherboard is not that hard at all, since they can be based on previous KT133 designs in most cases. All in all, it’s no surprise that every manufacturer is bring a KT133A product into this competitive market.

Continuing our coverage of KT133A motherboards is the MSI K7T Turbo. Their KT133 solution, the K7T Pro2, which was crowned Editor’s Choice Gold in our most recent Socket-A motherboard roundup, has put MSI in the spotlight as one of the best motherboard manufacturers in the world. MSI always produces high quality motherboard solutions, and they are now directly competing with the likes of ABIT and ASUS when it comes to features, especially overclocking and tweaking features.

With their award winning K7T Pro2, MSI should have a lot of confidence in designing the K7T Turbo. Of course, the big question is, "is this board as solid as its older brother?" And with ABIT and EPoX's solutions being so attractive, what new features can MSI add to the K7T Turbo to make it stand out? We were lucky enough to receive a pre-production sample of the K7T Turbo from MSI for evaluation purposes, and it's time to see how it compares with other KT133A motherboards. However, keep in mind that this is a pre-production board, so the shipping version may be slightly different.