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ICQ# 16388743
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MSI K7T Pro 2-A Review
The location of everything on this board was thoroughly thought out by the designers at MSI. First, the ATX power connector is located away from the CPU socket, at the top of the board next to the first DIMM slot. This is an easily accessible location, allowing you to remove power without having to reach around the socket, and more importantly, keeps the power cable away from the CPU which helps with the much needed airflow to cool these hot AMD processors. The IDE and floppy connectors are also located near the top of the board. This location helps to keep your large cables away from your PCI expansion cards. You will also probably notice the gold heat sink which covers the VIA North Bridge. MSI has rotated the North Bridge 45°, which reduces the length of the traces on the PCB. MSI has done this as an attempt to reduce signal interference to increase system stability. The only problem with the board layout is with the distance between the DIMM slots and AGP slot. With just about any AGP card installed, you will have to remove the card in order to remove any SDRAM installed. There isn’t enough room to open the DIMM clips. It is a slight inconvenience if you just want to swap out some memory. The board also includes (2) 3-pin fan headers, one for use with your CPU fan, and another for a case fan, both with RPM sensing.
The BIOS allows you many options and values that you can adjust. If you are not confident with your ability, rather than customizing settings, you can choose to use fail-safe defaults, or optimized performance settings. It is completely Plug & Play compatible, and offers ACPI. Gone are the days of moving jumpers on your board before installing your processor. It includes complete jumperless FSB and Multiplier adjustments. In the advanced settings, you can specify any FSB adjustment from 100 ~ 166. Unfortunately, due to the limitations of the KT133 chipset, you probably will not be successful running any FSB higher than 112 MHz. You can also adjust your Multiplier in steps of 0.5. The latest bios versions allow a multiplier setting of 5.0 ~ 12.5 You can also change your I/O voltage from 3.3 Volts to 3.4 Volts. There are also adjustments for the Core voltage. From the default of 1.75V, you can use voltages ranging from 1.5V ~ 1.85V. It is recommended that all users use all default settings; the only time that you should adjust any of these settings is if you are attempting to overclock your processor. The BIOS also reports voltage, fan RPM, and CPU temperature measurements. A great feature of the K7T Pro 2-A, is the option to run your SDRAM at 133 MHz, even though your FSB is only running 100 MHz. This gives faster and better memory performance, which will increase the overall performance of your system.
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