Date:
Wednesday, June 13, 2001
Author:
Matt Waters
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
Google +1

MSI K7 Master 760 Chiset

MicroStar comes out swinging with their K7 Master board based on the AMD 760 DDR chipset. Winner? Loser? In between? Read Matt's first review with us, we really like the angle he took with it and he comes up with some very valid points you will want to know about if you are going to be purchasing a DDR board sooner or later.

K7-Master or K7-Minion?

We’re going to have a look at another DDR motherboard offering from MicroStar for the Socket-A platform, but this time it’s armed with the AMD-761 System Controller (northbridge) and the now infamous VIA 686B Peripheral Bus Controller (southbridge) for it’s chipsets as the MSI K-7 Master (MS-6341).

Currently MSI has produced Socket-A DDR motherboards using the Ali Magik1, VIA KT266, and AMD-760 chipsets. With the price of DDR memory dropping to PC133 pricing levels it is once again starting to create interest in the DDR platform from prospective buyers. The current TBird Athlon and Duron CPU’s performance difference between PC133 and DDR isn’t that dramatic, on average about 10% when compared to a KT133A platform, but with the cost of the memory now being basically the same and the upcoming Athlon4 having data prefetch optimizations added to the core design which should allow it to make better use of DDR’s increased bandwidth, it certainly makes it an option worth considering for the performance minded person.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about the [H]ardOCP reader from spending time in the [H]ardforums, it’s that performance and stability are key factors when considering their motherboard purchases and we’re about to find out if this board can truly carry the name "Master".

Physical Properties

Total technical specifications for the board can be found here on MSI’s site. In it’s base configuration it has one 4x AGP Pro slot with the added AGP power supply connector next to the slot for the more demanding professional cards, five 32 bit PCI slots, and one CNR (Communication Network Riser) slot. The onboard VIA 686B southbridge has dual ATA100 IDE controllers that can connect up to 4 devices and the integrated AC97 audio with joystick game port. Mainboard RAM memory is held in two 184 pin DDR-DIMM slots for a maximum configuration of 2GB. The board has rear panel connectors for one parallel, two serial, two USB, keyboard, mouse, the onboard sound and game port. MSI also manufactures a variant called the K7 Master-S with On-Board Ultra 160 SCSI for those users who need a SCSI capability as well.

Included on the board are three cooling fan headers marked for CPU, system, and power supply as well as connectors for “Wake on Ring” and “Wake on LAN” functions. The CPU socket has a good area of clearance around it for larger than normal heatsinks, the model I used during the review was a Vantec FCE-62540D as seen below. Also of some note is the placement of the ATX power connector that lies between the CPU socket and the rear panel connectors. Although it shouldn’t provide a real issue with airflow around the CPU socket, it’s probably a good idea to use something like a cable tie to attach the ATX power cable up and away from the CPU cooling fan and heatsink.

Article Image   Article Image   Article Image

BIOS and Settings

Main system BIOS is from Award and comes with the fairly standard menu of options found in today’s Socket-A motherboards. It’s full featured, giving the user the ability to control almost everything directly from the bios including its multiplier overclocking capabilities. DING DING ! Yes you heard that right folks. Once again MSI has produced a Socket-A platform that allows the user to change CPU multiplier settings through the bios allowing for some of that faster FREE speed that lies in the hearts of a great deal of Socket-A CPUs out there. However the current version of the bios, version 1.1, has a limitation in this area (and a way around it I discovered) that I will go into in detail when we start looking specifically at the boards overclocking capabilities and performance.

This BIOS does not contain quite as many system tweaks, SDRAM 1T command and memory interleaving settings as it’s brother the KT266 Pro also reviewed here at [H]ardOCP, but it still offers several options to allow the user to optimize their system performance. It does have settings to adjust CPU multiplier, core voltage, and some front side bus settings and as with the later versions of the AMD 750 based motherboards there is also a Super Bypass option, which if enabled will let the chipset internally bypass certain memory to CPU pipe stages for optimal performance. In the tests I ran on the board there were some slight improvements in the numbers. We encountered no stability issues with the Super Bypass enabled so it was utilized for all testing shown here.

Article Image   Article Image