Introduction

MSI have been making motherboard for as long as I can recall. MSI have also been a supporter of the AMD K7 line of processors from the very beginning. MSI's first AMD motherboard was a Slot A called the MS-6169. This board was based on AMD's Irongate 750 chipset and was one of the very few to actually use the AMD 756 Viper Southbridge chipset. This board like most of the AMD 750 based boards had problems working with the GeForce video cards at AGP 2x. MSI released a newer version of the MS-6169 called the MSI K7 Pro. This board once again featured the AMD 750 chipset and changed over form the 756-viper Southbridge to the VIA VT82C686A Southbridge which helped fix the problems with the GeForce video card. Also on top of this, the K7 Pro featured the new C5 stepping of the AMD 750 chipset. This new stepping allowed what AMD calls "Super By-pass" which greatly increased memory performance. This was the last Slot A board made by MSI, skipping the whole KX133 phase. When the KT133 chipset and the new socket A architecture came out, MSI immediately designed and released the MSI K7T Pro which we reviewed a while ago. The K7T Pro featured 6PCI, 1AGP 4x and 1CNR slot with onboard sound and was a well featured board. When the overclocking options of the Socket A Athlon and Duron were found by overclockers on the Internet, MSI took the K7T Pro and added the ability to use the AMD overclocking options and called it the K7T Pro 2. This board was identical in layout to the K7T Pro only difference was the new overclocking options to allow the user to change the clock multiplier of the CPU. When VIA released the 686B Southbridge which added native ATA-100 support MSI took the K7T Pro 2 and changed the Southbridge from the 686A which the K7T pro and Pro2 used. This board was then called the MSI K7T Pro 2A, which we also reviewed earlier.

With the introduction of the VIA KT133A chipset, MSI has once again jumped in and have produced a new board in the K7T family called the MSI K7T Turbo-R which we are investigating today.