Jason

KT133A motherboards have flooded the market lately, and motherboard makers have reported strong sales. Strong sales are attracting motherboard manufacturers. . In these times of slowing PC sales, motherboard manufacturers have to attack those few strong markets. In order to differentiate their products, more and more features are added to the KT133A motherboards, in order to stand out from the already large crowd of motherboards. KT133A is a small upgrade to the popular KT133 chipset. VIA have only added support for running the CPU bus at 133/266 MHz in order to use the new Athlons (C-stepping) with this new bus speed. This is not the reason why it has become so popular though. The main reason for it’s popularity is the possibility to overclock existing Durons and Athlons to a 133 MHz bus. As it also supports the new Athlons it also provide a future upgrade path. The K7T Turbo-R is MSI’s flagship KT133A motherboard, and it is aimed at the power users needing the best of the best. MSI have become one of the biggest Socket A motherboard manufacturers. From their first efforts, to their latest MSI K7T Pro 2-A and now the MSI K7T Turbo and K7T Turbo-R, they have established a very good reputation. Lately MSI have added more and more overclocking options to their boards. This is one of the reasons why this board is so interesting. While Abit have a wealth of overclocking options and memory tweakings in their boards, they lack a bit of stability and they are reported to have a higher failure rate on their boards than other manufacturers. Asus is the other traditional choice for the power users, and while their products are stable and solid performers, they lack the BIOS overclocking and tweaking options the ABIT boards have. With the K7T Turbo(-R) MSI have tried to take the best from both Abit and ASUS it seems. Read on to find out more about this board

Specifications:
CPU
Athlon and Duron Socket A
Support for 600 – 1500 MHz processors
Motherboard Chipset
VIA KT133A northbridge
- 100/200 & 133/266MHz bus support.
VIA 686B southbridge
- ATA-100 support
- AC97 Audio

Memory
- 3 DIMM slots
- Max 1.5 GB RAM
- 3.3v SDRAM DIMM

Expansion slots
- One AGP slot 1x/2x/4x
- One CNR slot
- Six PCI slots

On-Board IDE
- Promise IDE RAID controller
- 686B IDE support
- Total support for up to 8 IDE units

Peripheral support
- Floppy
- 2 serial ports
- 1 parallell port
- 4 USB ports
- Audio in/out/mic
- Diagnostic LED

BIOS
- Award BIOS
Features

The features of the motherboard are almost perfect. The inclusion of a CNR slot is understandable as it gives OEMs the ability to include cheap sound cards. But for the ordinary homebuilder, an ISA slot would have been a better choice. Another minor issue is the standard AGP slot. An AGP Pro slot would have been preferable, but at the moment few cards use it. This might change when graphic cards based on the gigantic GeForce3 are released. For the extreme overclockers out there, you might think twice before buying this board as the north bridge only has a heatsink, and not a fan. This makes the north bridge a potensial limitation for the ones that feel like pushing the board to it’s limits. But for the normal overclockers, this should not be a problem, since PCI and AGP speeds will be very high at the bus speeds that this board is capable of as it is. Overall, the expansion options are very good. Few users will fill up all the expansion options. Just think about it: 3 DIMM slots, 4 USB, 6 PCI slots, 1 CNR slot and 8 IDE units.
The board also comes with a variety of software:
- PC Alert III is an application that monitors the CPU temperature, voltage and a lot of other stuff.

- fuzzyLogic is an application that makes it possible to overclock the machine from Windows. Just type in the bus speed you want, and hit the "Go"-button, and your machine will use that bus speed.

- LiveBIOS makes it possible to check on the web if there are any new BIOS' and if there is a new BIOS, the BIOS will be updated.

Layout

The layout of the board is also very good. The power connector is sensibly located on the edge of the board. The CPU socket is located near the expansion ports, and it is not the best placement I’ve seen, but it is not bad. There is enough space around the CPU socket for most coolers on the market. The FOP 32-1 fits with at least 1cm of space around it.

The board has some really big capacitors around the CPU socket, which most new KT133A have. The difference from the ABit KT7 capacitors to those on the K7T Turbo is huge. This is also important with regard to future upgrades. The RAID IDE connectors are located in a way that might prevent the use of full-length PCI cards in 2 or maybe three of the PCI slots. As you can see above, the north bridge is rotated in order to shorten the length of the traces between the North bridge and the CPU.

Overclocking

With an unlocked Duron or Athlon, KT133 motherboards made it easy to overclock by adjusting the multiplier. It’s possible to overclock KT133 motherboards by adjusting the FSB, but limitations in the VIA north bridge made it impossible to overclock the FSB past 115 MHz. Most KT133 motherboards struggled with a 105-110 MHz FSB. It is better to overclock the FSB, since it will raise memory performance, than to overclock by adjusting the multiplier. Memory performance is very important regarding overall system performance. You will see examples of this later. With the KT133A chipset, VIA have eliminated this limitation, and this makes motherboards using the KT133A chipset very good at doing FSB overclocking. The MSI K7T Turbo-R is very good at overclocking. You can select multipliers from 5x - 12.5x and bus speeds between 100-166 MHz in 1MHz increments. A jumper is used to distinguish between the two 100-132MHz and 133-166MHz bus speed ranges. Now, let’s start the overclocking experiments. The following system was used: AMD Duron 650 MHz (unlocked)
128 MB Crucial PC133 CL2 SDRAM
Voodoo3 graphics card
IBM GXP 45 GB HD
MSI K7T Turbo-R motherboard
First I tested how high I could push the board by using a 100 MHz bus. With it I reached 900 MHz (9x100) without any problems whatsoever. Above 900 MHz, it wouldn’t run stable at all, but I haven’t been able to run this CPU any higher with the KT133 either, so the CPU probably limits it. Then I started testing how high I could push FSB. First, I set the multiplier to 5x, a great feature in this motherboard. Then I set the Vcore to 1.85v(the sample I received always reported higher voltages than the ones I selected in the BIOS. I could push the Vcore up to 1.96v. The 1.85v I used here was set in the bios as 1.70v). After that, I removed the jumper in order to run the FSB at 133 MHz. The machine booted without any problems whatsoever. Then I tried 140 MHz.. Still no problems..
Then I tried 145 MHz.. Still 100% stable..
Then I tried 150 MHz..Still 100% stable..
Then I tried 155 MHz… Lot’s of errors in Windows.
Upped the Vcore to 1.9v.. 100% stable…
After that, I didn’t go any further since it can damage your PCI and AGP cards by using such a high FSB. And since I had to use a higher voltage than what is standard, I felt few people would have any use for further experiments

Performance, Stability, Conclusion and rating


Performance
I've only included a few benchmarks, as all the different KT133A motherboards perform relatively close. I've rather demonstrated how important the bus speed is on how your machine performs.

Stability
This board is very stable. I haven’t had any crashes in Windows except when I pushed the FSB to 155MHz.
Conclusion and rating
I’m very impressed with this motherboard. It combines great stability with very good overclocking options. There are a few things I would like to change about the layout of the board, but they are merely inconveniences, and not crucial for the operation of the board.