MSI K7T Turbo-R

The board

As we noted earlier, the K7T Turbo (MS6330 v3.0) is built around VIA's KT133A chipset. The VT8363A North Bridge and the VT82C686B South Bridge, to be precise. This is VIA's last trump for the SDR platform and we can't help it but agree with them, no matter where we look at. Take the MSI board, or take Iwill's offering (KK266) and you definitely won't regret it, as both of them are reportedly cruising quite well with insane FSB speeds - up to 166MHz (333MHz DDR). We could only verify this up to 145MHz (our CPU maxed out at that speed, but the board was rock stable). More on this later, but first let's dig into the most important specifications.

The K7T Turbo also carries a RAID capable IDE controller, the Promise 20265R. Compared to the AMI chip found on Iwill's offering, Promise offers a bit less, but manages RAID 0/1 just as well. This means that mirroring (for double safety) or striping (for double speed) is possible, but not both at the same time (RAID 0+1, or RAID 5 operation). Actually, IDE RAID is definitely cheap and fun to play with, but given the fact that the IDE controller can only address one device on the bus at a time, it might not be the wisest choice. If you are very serious about RAID, vote for SCSI. On the other hand, if you are seeking for a reasonable transfer speed increase, IDE RAID is much-much cheaper. Anyhow, hats off to MSI for including the option.

We used a 600MHz Duron (first series, shipped with unlocked multiplier) for our test, which unfortunately maxed out before the K7T Turbo did, at 870MHz. I am saying unfortunately, because we were really kicking for high FSBs. To make sure RAM wasn't the limiting factor, 2 sticks of Crucial PC133 CAS/2 (2-2-2 timing Micron chips) SDRAM were seated in the DIMM slots. As the MSI board, unlike the Soltek SL-75KAV-X, did not support a 5.5X multiplier (with which we could have lowered the multiplier and raised the FSB even more..), our config gave up at anything above 870MHz (6 x 145MHz). That is still very respectable, at 145MHz FSB the board was operating with the most agressive RAM settings, and have not crashed a single time! Soltek's version didn't even post at 139MHz, so MSI is a clear winner here. General concensus is that the K7T Turbo runs flawlessly at a 150MHz FSB, which is pretty much the last sensible FSB to use anyway, as PCI (with 1/4 multiplier) and AGP (with 1/2 multiplier - no matter what Sandra says, as even Sandra 2001 does NOT recognize the KT133A chipset properly) speeds above 150MHz start to get unhealthy.

A cikk még nem ért véget, kérlek, lapozz!