Bottom Line
What is the bottom line? We are going to have to separate how we rate the board into 2 groups. The first group is most of you, the normal guy and/or the mild overclocker. The second group is comprised of people like me who are more picky about their boards. The kinds of guys who take a soldering iron to pretty much every board that comes through! Aren't afraid of doing more extreme things. Group 2 members are much harder to please than group 1.
Normal guy
Good
KT333 and it's Async goodness
Hard to beat number of features
Widely available
Flexible without the ARU you for ~$110US and ~$20 more for the ARU additions.
Software - Things like the Live Driver you'll love for sure.
Red PCB makes it go up in the *cool* factor
The KT333 is currently the fastest single CPU chipset for the Athlon's and Durons.
If you already have a good KT266a based board such as the Soyo Dragon Plus that has plenty of features and fair overclocking, then this wouldn't be worth the dough of upgrading. If you have a KT266a based board that lacks a lot of good features then you may just want to upgrade to a board like this one.
Bad
Shipping BIOS is rather buggy so you'll probably want to flash the BIOS as one of your first things you do with this board.
As long as you flash to a newer BIOS and don't plan on running high bus speeds then you really can't go wrong by choosing this board. Future shipments of this board will be using a newer revision of the BIOS so the only problem with this board for the normal guy will be fixed very soon.
For the normal guy, this board scores 95% in my eyes. A person like my dad would be extremely happy with this board. It's got great onboard digital audio, (I'm a huge fan of digital optical output's clarity) a total of 8 USB ports out of the box included 4 USB 2.0 ports are going above and beyond the call of duty for MSI. Onboard IDE RAID is a bit of a standard now days.
Overclocking point of view
Good
Fuzzy Logic - Great for finding that max speed without frequent reboots
Nice voltage selections on the CPU, AGP and memory
HIP6302 - Very easy voltage mod
It uses a red PCB for us to showcase in our windows
Decent fan on the Northbridge
Bad
No 1/5 or higher divider
Buggy shipping BIOS
Better boards will surely show up shortly.
Features galore may just overcome its overclocking shortcomings for most people. If you don't intend on running your system bus at around 166Mhz or higher then all of the added features of this board will really catch your eye. It's a nice red color and really does look nice for all of you who want to put a board on display.
The lack of 1/5 or higher divider kills this board in my eyes. The worst part of this is the clock generator even supports higher dividers than the BIOS does. In my eyes, a 333 board should be able to do 333 with, and without the Asynchronous memory. In order for 333 to work you will HAVE to support this 1/5 divider. Asynchronous memory is like trying to park 3 cars in a 2 car garage. I've never been a fan of this. The additional memory bandwidth doesn't really add much if your CPU just can't receive the data quick enough.
For the true extremist this board falls short. It just won't cut it! Other boards either already out, or coming up shortly will support the much needed additional dividers, so why waste your greenbacks on this board? I can't mark this board down too horribly much by something than could possibly be written into a future BIOS. 85% is the grade for this board since I am optimistic of the possibility of improvements.
Overall Score: 95%: Normal Joe, 85%: King Overclocker
forums
send article 
hardware newsletter 
article comments (20)
Digg this!
del.icio.us