MSI K7T266Pro2-RU Motherboard Review - MSI K7T266Pro2-RU Motherboard Review
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Company: MSI
Product: K7T266 Pro2-RU Motherboard
Availability: In online stores now
Price: $135.00
Board Layout: When it comes to the layout of a motherboard, I am fairly particular. Infact, if I see an ATX power connector mid-range down on a mobo, or right up against the socket, I won't even consider using it. Asinine is the word that comes to mind.
Clicking the thumbnail, you will see 1 CNR slot (worthless to most, if not all of us), 5 PCI slots, 1 AGP slot, 1 Socket 462, 3 DDR memory slots, 2 IDE ports, 2 RAID ports, and 1 floppy port. Relatively typical of your standard mobo. Only 5 PCI's you say? Well, I was a bit concerned, however, we do have onboard AC '97 audio so that really takes care of one slot. And lets be realistic. Who on gods green earth needs more than 5 PCI's? Other than bragging rights of course. 5 is surely adequate.
3 DDR memory slots is also fairly standard, and you'll see up to 4 on some motherboards. Although, this board does support 3GB of memory, and that is more than enough. I do like the fact that this board supports 1GB memory sticks, so that is a bonus in and of itself. We've also heard of problems in KT266A motherboards with 4 memory slots. [H]ard OCP's review of the Shuttle AK31 r1.0 advises they can only run 3 sticks of memory at any given time. Running 4 would keep the board from booting at all. Maybe MSI foresaw problems with a 4 slot setup and decided not to go with it.
The 2 RAID ports are down in the bottom corner. Not my favorite placement of these, but all VIA based DDR boards have them in the same spot. I guess VIA decided to keep the width of the motherboard down somewhat and placed the optional RAID controller ports down out of the way. Those of you with full tower cases may need some longer cables if you plan on running RAID. Something to consider.
Lets checkout some close-up's of the various parts on this board.
Look closely, this is the tail end of the AGP slot for your video card. I have seen various flavors of the AGP locking mechanism, but this one is quite unique. I would say it is VERY close to the same type of lock-in as the memory slots. Just push your video card in, and hear the AGP lock securely on your card. Definitely a welcome feature for keeping your card nice and secure in it's slot. This is one of the many things you'll see on the board that shows MSI has gone the extra mile to make a great product.
Here are your CD, AUX and MDM jacks for the on-board AC '97 audio. Standard fare connectors, and pretty much out of the way of the important stuff.
Here is the Northbridge chipset adorned with a small heatsink and the MSI/DDR logo. You'll notice the lack of active cooling that you would normally see on the majority of VIA chipsets nowadays. A possible reason this particular board is not billed as an overclocker. However, that is easily taken care of given the right tools. Unfortunately, the heatsink is mounted with some type of adhesive instead of pushpins. Otherwise I would have pulled it off to see what was going on under there, but since I didn't have any frag tape, or Arctic Adhesive, I chose to leave it untouched.
The VT8233 SouthBridge chipset. This is the little sucker that controls your PCI Bus, ATA Controllers, USB, Parallel, Floppy, Keyboard and Mouse, as well as the integrated audio.
MSI opted to use the Promise brand controller for the RAID setup. I have used Promise cards in the past and have nothing but good stuff to say about them. Infact, Promise is usually first to market with the latest in ATA technologies, so you know you can't really go wrong there.
This is the embedded D-LED on the motherboard. A nifty device that helps you troubleshoot and diagnose problems during boot-up. It also has a series of lights to show you what's going on during the boot process. I'm not sure how accurate it is however. I left the memory slots open and upon boot-up I received the indication that there was no CPU installed. Still, it did let me know something was amiss. There is also a 2port USB bracket that has a D-LED unit for those of us that do not have easy access to our cases. Another nice addition to this motherboards many additions.
Lets checkout the PCI, Socket, USB2.0 and more on the next page.
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