Planet Hardware heeft als eerste een review online staan van de MSI K7T Master, een KT133 plankje met on-board Ultra160 SCSI (Adaptec AIC-7892 chipset) en FireWire support . De layout mag er met 1xAGP Pro, 6xPCI, 1xCNR en 4xDIMM ook best wezen. Overclocking kan helaas alleen gedaan worden via 15 verschillende busspeeds die ingesteld kunnen worden via MSI's bekende Fuzzy Logic II winproggie. Het geteste exemplaar strandde al op 107MHz FSB
. Al met al een zeer compleet Athlon plankje die toch wat kansen laat liggen op tweakbaarheid.
The MSI K7T Master has a really solid framework for end users to work from, but a couple of things keep it from being a truly great board. The lack of SCSI cabling is very disappointing, as well as sub-par overclocking options. With the breadth of options that the K7T Pro offered, we had thought the K7T Master would offer the same. Unfortunately, the Master lacks core voltage tweaks - and skimps on some of the FSB settings.
The inclusion of on-board SCSI and FireWire do go a long way, especially for users keen on keeping the costs of their systems to a minimal. FireWire is just a technology that never quite caught on, with few manufacturers producing devices that worked with the interface. For those in the high-end server/workstation market, there are some FireWire hard drives to be had, which serve up performance equivalent to U160 SCSI. To most end users though, this feature will go unused.
As we covered during our SCSI Explained article, Ultra160 SCSI serves up extremely fast transfer rates. We'll be taking a look at how the U160 performance on the K7T Master handles against a dedicated SCSI controller card, like the Adaptec 29160. Stay tuned for that over the next few days.