Hirdetés
MSI K7T Turbo-R
Let's make a bet! I bet that most people don't know which four mainboard manufacturers produce the third of all motherboards available worldwide. Many would probably for guess small, "secondary" companies barely having 1-2% share, trying to live side by side with the big names. And although a few OEMs do take a great portion of the whole market, users buying complete systems from companies like HP/IBM/Compaq/etc generally have little idea about the make of the mainboard that resides therein. Therefore, being loyal to a certain company's certain product makes absolutely no sense in this case..
We will get back to all this, but before that, please take the time and allow us to introduce the newest guest in our humble lab (drum rolling in a distance.. :)).. ..the MSI K7T Turbo-R! Here it is, full sized, all in its glory, which is only strange because the board shouldn't have existed when it first knocked on our door: MSI announced the K7T Turbo-R only a few days later. Of course, most of the big hardware sites already had their review online. Nevertheless, this is a good start. For us :).
While most of the boards that we have tested were carrying the VIA KT133 chipset, the K7T Turbo was equipped with the newer and shinier KT133A chip. To put it short, this boils down to being able to run the FSB (Front Side Bus) at 133MHz (266MHz DDR) and not only the memory (using the asynchronous memory clock option) as it was the case with the now "obsolete" KT133. The KT133A allows the RAM and the EV6 system bus to share the same clock (yes, the EV6 bus uses a DDR signaling, but the input clock actually remains at 133MHz, with data being transfered at both rising and falling edges), boosting performance. As you will see from our upcoming GeForce2 Ultra article, FSB plays a vital role in global performance..
Back to DDR: one would expect that the KT133A chipset, with only SDR (Single Data Rate) memory could significantly fall behind the existing DDR solutions (such as the AMD-760 and the ALi MAGiK1 chipset) in terms of performance. This is not the case, you don't necessarily need 266MHz DDR SDRAM to accompany the 266MHz DDR EV6 bus. At least, the Athlon/Duron might not be able to take full advantage of the extra bandwidth (but certainly more than the Pentium III). Our Iwill KA266-R review shows that the migration to DDR RAM didn't bring any dramatic differences. Not yet. It will, it should. Otherwise, we will once again face strange and mixed reactions as we did with Intel's brand new i815 chipset. It was new, it was hyped, but the "rusty-ol'" BX chipset, which should have been history by the time of the i815 debut, still performed better.. so, until the winds of change (and some CHEAP DDR memory) the KT133A is VIA's grand weapon and as such, the K7T Turbo could be the board to have..
I promised to get back to the little bet I made at beginning of our article. Any guesses so far for the four (say that very fast 10 times :)) companies? We were talking about big players, others "being seated" only in the second row, but haven't mentioned any names. Well, here they are in alphabetical order: ASUS, ECS, Gigabyte and MSI. And here they are in the order of market shares: ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI and finally ECS. But this is not all. ECS and ASUS had average income growth of 21%/26% compared to last year, which is far behind that of Gigabyte's 48%, and even further behind MSI's phenomenal 58% (source: Taiwan Digitimes, 2001.01.10.)! Of course, many of you might remember that MSI had a huge, 100% increase in sales in '98. Please don't be skeptical as the situation is very different now, trying to double an existing 7% share of the market is not trivial by all means, that +58% is big numbers. One thing for sure however: if MSI is able to maintain their current rates, ASUS will be trumped for good. This already happened, but only for a month (this January), when MSI surpassed ASUS in sales by over 10%, producing about 980.000 motherboards.
So, this means that MSI (Micro-Star International) is one of the biggest players in the mainboard industry. But in fact, MSI is a lot more. MSI is a main innovator of motherboard features. Just think of "magic words" like Fuzzy Logic III, Live BIOS, PC2PC, D-Led and D-Bracket. And these are all a feature bonus to the MSI boards that already have the stability of their ASUS counterparts and the "tweakability" of the famous/infamous Abit boards! Don't forget the reasonable price, as MSI is determined to deliver prices 15% better than ASUS.
A cikk még nem ért véget, kérlek, lapozz!
