MSI is one company that is always one of the first to release a VIA chipset or any chipset for the AMD Athlon.
MSI has very close ties with VIA and AMD. They are always among the very first to bring boards for a new chipset to market. This is also the very first KT333 based board that has come through my door.
What does the KT333 offer over the older KT266a? Really only two things. The first only only big improvement is the ability to run your memory asynchronous with your CPU bus. When your processor is running on a 133/266 bus you can have your RAM running at 166/333 at the same time. This gives you a 25% increase in theoretical memory bandwidth. Does this hold up though to real world usage?
The second new feature is only an improvement in the South Bridge to support ATA 133. Since most good KT266a based boards sport ATA133 RAID controllers this second feature is really no reason to upgrade.
|
Motherboard Specifications
|
|
Chipset
|
VIA KT333
|
|
Multiplier
Options |
6x - 15x
|
|
Bus Speed
Options |
100-220 MHz
|
|
Voltages
|
1.725v - 1.85v
|
|
Dividers
|
1/3,
1/4 |
|
Memory
Support |
3 x 184-pin DDR
|
|
Expansion
Slots |
5PCI, 1AGP,
1CNR |
|
USB Support
|
2x Standard USB
ports on the mobo
2x USB ports on riser
4x USB 2.0 ports |
|
Integrated
Components |
6-channel AC'97
Audio |
|
Bios
|
AMI BIOS
|
|
Onboard IDE
|
2 x ATA133
EIDE
2 x ATA133 EIDE RAID |
 |
| Fuzzy Logic 3 |
Software Included
Fuzzy Logic 3
Live Driver
MSI DVD player
PC-cillin
PC Alert
What is this stuff?
Fuzzy Logic is a nice monitoring and overclocking utility. It monitors your CPU fan RPM, CPU temp, vcore, CPU AGP and PCI clocks. You can increase the FSB of your system right in windows. It has an auto overclock button that runs a bit of a graphic demo to put a load on the CPU and slowly increases the FSB speed automatically. Or of course there's a manual button which I suggest using. you can bump the bus up to whatever speed you want and press the go button. This will of course cause your system to crash if you go too far so I suggest not having any work type things or any unsaved data open while you use this utility!
Live driver is another unique utility brought to you by MSI. The only thing that I can really compare it to is Microsoft's Windows Update. This utility allows you to connect to MSI's servers and look for the latest BIOS, Utilities and Drivers available for your motherboard. Unfortunately it doesn't have anything built in for Beta files.
PC Alert is a more detailed monitoring utility than fuzzy logic. PC-Cillin is an anti-virus program, and MSI's DVD player is a software DVD player that has all the standard features that you would expect. I don't have a DVD Drive in my computer so I didn't get a chance to use the playback features.
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