Mike Andrawes van AnandTech heeft weer een nieuwe review ge-upt, ditmaal van het MSI K7Pro AMD 750 Slot-A ATX moederbord. Dit is een nieuw Athlon mobo van MSI dat helaas niet gebaseert is op de nieuwe Via KX133 chipset maar nog op de oude AMD chipset. Ze hebben alleen wel wat aan het reference design verandert dat ze met hun eerdere Athlon bord volgden. Op de MSI K7Pro is nu namelijk geen AMR slot te vinden alhoewel een ISA slot nog wel aanwezig is. Uiteindelijk kreeg het plankje een rating van 7 uit 10:
The biggest issue we had with the K7Pro is that it is based on a
chipset that is being phased out instead of a more up to date
solution, VIA's KX133. While the AGP 4X support of the KX133
doesn't offer a huge performance improvement over the AGP 2X
limitation of the AMD 750 chipset, the PC133 memory support of
the KX133 can definitely come in handy, especially in professional
level applications that are very memory bandwidth dependent.
Our particular K7Pro sample had trouble with the Irongate's
SuperBypass feature, which greatly enhances performance.
Although the BIOS had an option for enabling it, that option was
grayed out, indicating that SuperBypass was not detected. The next
step was to use a software utility to enable it. We found that we had
an AMD 751 North Bridge that was revision C6, which should be
sufficient for SuperBypass support. Unfortunately, for reasons
unknown to us, the system would lockup whenever we tried to
enable it. We'll let MSI know what we found and hopefully a fix will
become available.
If for some reason you're still looking for a motherboard based on
the AMD 750 chipset, the K7Pro is an excellent choice. It's less
expensive than most other AMD 750 boards, while stability, quality,
and features are up there with the best of them. We are confident
that the SuperBypass issue we encountered will be resolved with a
BIOS update. However, the KX133 chipset is now widely available
and generally provides better performance without introducing any
drawbacks. For now, we'll have to recommend that users looking for
the best Athlon solution consider a KX133 board, but there's no
doubt that K7Pro is a solid motherboard.
