MSI Mayhem

There’s not a ton of info out there, and there’s a couple people with an agenda out there, too, but this is what
appears to be happening:

  1. For God’s sake, pay absolute attention to the exact names of these boards. If you don’t, you could easily end up with an Intel DDR board or an AMD non-DDR board. Shame on MSI for such name confusion.
  2. A few people are reporting that they have gotten pre-production versions of the MSI K7 Master-S AMD760 based motherboard. The production model appears to be version 1.1 of the board.
  3. It looks like some review sites and perhaps some purchasers have gotten pre-production versions of the MSI K7TPro266 Via KT266 (MS-6380) motherboard. Can’t swear to it, though.

  4. It looks like that on at least some of the earlier boards, there may be a resistor in the wrong place.
    Someone took a board meant for review and took a resistor from one place, and put it in another. This provided a bit of boost (but not as much as changing the BIOS from 1.00 to 1.09). See here under April 13th to see which resistors, and what a “fixed” one looks like. If you already have a K7TPro266, you might want to look at your board (unfortunately, what I’ve seen so far doesn’t indicate where on the board they are). If there is a resistor at R127; it’s “unfixed”; if there’s one at R126; it’s “fixed.”

  5. Before you get your soldering iron out, MSI has not acknowledged anything is “broken.” More importantly, we don’t know yet if any, some or all of the review or up-for-sale mobos are “broken” or “fixed,” we haven’t yet had anybody duplicate what this guy did, and we don’t really have enough detail about this particular system yet.
  6. There appears to be three BIOSes for the K7TPro266 out there. Version 1.00 is slow. Version 1.09 has much better memory scores, but stability is questionable, especially with aggressive BIOS settings. Version 1.10 appears to slow memory scores back down quite a bit.

So What Should I Do If I Don’t Have A DDR Board?

Right now, NOTHING!!!.

What If I Already Have One of These MSI Boards?

Right now, SOMETHING!!! 🙂

If you have an MSI K7 Master-S

If you could, email me with the following:

1. Where you got it from and when.
2. What version of the board do you have?
3. If you have some software that identifies motherboards, what version does it say you have?
4. If you happened to have some benchmarks handy, wouldn’t mind seeing those. 🙂

If you have an MSI K7TPro266

If you could, email me with the following:

1. Where you got it from and when.
2. What version of the board do you have?
3. If you have some software that identifies motherboards, what version does it say you have?
4. If possible, if you can find R126 and R127, could you tell me where they are? After that, tell me whether the resistor is on R126, R127, or both.

5. If you’ve tried some of these new BIOSes out, I wouldn’t mind knowing what the memory scores are, and your general impression of stability (please also indicate your OS).

Conclusion

To the extent one can come up with a conclusion, not only do these boards not look fully cooked, but a few of them may have missed the pot. 🙂

Does it means AMD760 is the only way to go? No, of course not. Even at worst, not like this is only Via DDR mobo that will ever come out. There’s already a Gigabyte and Soltek Via mobo floating out there someplace on the planet (though not on Pricewatch). None of the other heavy hitters have even taken a swing yet.

Email Ed


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