Micro-Star K7T Turbo-R Review :: Conclusion

The MSI K7T Turbo-R is a feature-rich motherboard that is going to be a favorite in the mid- and high-end market because of the bang-for-buck trade-off the end user can expect. Like the other VIA KT133A chipset motherboards, the advantage of using the existing low-priced SDRAM instead of the more costly DDR RAM makes this a very appealing motherboard for those looking to upgrade at minimal cost.

It seems as if the Athlon CPUs have taken over as the leader in the overclocking department, and the K7T Turbo-R has all the support needed to achieve a painless and stable overclock with your Athlon processor, with average increases of at least 100MHz and in many cases much higher. As with all overclocking, the best results can be reached with use of a good cooling solution and a little experimentation in the FSB and voltage setting controls in the system BIOS.

For your RAID control the Promise controller performs quite well, and the system ran fine in all variations of the RAID array. But it only comes with a light version of the Promise utility BIOS, which works okay, but it is a slimmed down version that does not have as many options as the full-featured BIOS. This will probably affect most people zero, but it should be known just in case someone has a very special requirement for their system configuration.

System builders and integrators who are looking for a stable solution for their KT133A chipset motherboard will find what they are looking for in this well-done product by MSI. The K7T-Turbo-R is a high-performance motherboard, and has what it takes to satisfy the power hungry and hell bent gamer crowd with its strong performance features. The office and business crowd will like the backup features of having a mirror image copy of their hard drive when using the RAID array in the mode 1 configuration. With all that this motherboard has going for it, I would have to say all in all this motherboard has appeal to many various markets and should do well for MSI.

Doc out!