MSI K7T Turbo Socket-A KT133A ATX

Aimed at overclockers

Ever since the release of the MSI K7T Pro2, most hardware enthusiasts have been aware of MSI’s efforts to provide some of the best product for reliable overclocking. In general MSI always focuses on making sure they include all the options so that users can push their CPUs to the limit, while making sure there is no degradation of stability.

Since the K7T Pro2, MSI has moved the multiplier and voltage tweaking into the BIOS for easy access, and there is no reason for MSI to drop that with the new K7T Turbo. Inside the Frequency / Voltage panel in the BIOS, you will be able to select the multiplier ratio setting for your CPU, provided that your have your AMD CPU unlocked already.

One interesting note is that when we first received the motherboard, it was using BIOS revision 10D. Later on MSI sent us a BIOS update, revision 10E, to correct some performance issues with the original.. In both revisions, the multiplier ratio settings we were able to select in the BIOS were only default, or from 8.5 to 12.5. Therefore, with the old BIOS, you might not be able to lower the multiplier in order to take advantage of higher FSB speeds. For example, if you have a 1GHz (100MHz FSB) CPU and you want to run it at 133MHz FSB, you would be out of luck since the multiplier ratio is 10, and even if you unlocked the CPU, you will not be able to get the multiplier ratio down to 7.5 on the K7T Turbo.

That constraint could really be a problem for overclockers everywhere. For example, when we tried to run our FSB testing, we ran into problems where we couldn’t increase the FSB speed a lot since the lowest multiplier ratio we were able to achieve was 8.5.

Fortunately, after some discussion with MSI, they released another revision of the BIOS, 10F, which has multiplier ratios from 5 to 12.5 available. We immediately flashed the new BIOS and ran all the tests again.

MSI is currently still debating whether they will include the new BIOS in the production version of the motherboard or provide the BIOS as an update on the website. Either way, you should have no problem in accessing lower multiplier ratio after a simple BIOS update.

For FSB speeds, MSI inherits the same design from the K7T Pro2 and allows users to choose FSB speed settings all the way from 100MHz to 166MHz in 1MHz increments. Just like the EPoX board, you will need to set a jumper on the motherboard in order to go from the 100MHz – 132MHz range to the 133MHz – 166MHz range. This is much easier than setting the FSB speed using only jumpers or dipswitches, but it is just not as easy as the ABIT KT7A-RAID, which is fully jumperless.

For CPU core voltage, you can choose between 1.300 and 1.800V in 0.025V increments, which is pretty typical these days. For I/O voltage, you can choose from either 3.3V or 3.45V.

There are a total of only two fan headers on the motherboard, one for the CPU HSF unit and one for the front chassis fan. This is odd since most of the time there are at least three fan headers, where one is for CPU HSF unit and two for chassis fans. In the PC Health panel inside BIOS, you will be able to read two temperatures and the speed of the two fans.