Wednesday, April 26, 2000

Introduction

Rarely deprived of originality, MSI's motherboards often bristle with features that can't be found among competing products. While it uses a chipset that has been left somewhat destitute (the AMD 750/756) with the arrival of the VIA KX-133, MSI's K7 Pro still possess a suite of features that put it in a class of its own.
With its D-LED system, for instance, the K7 Pro allows for rapid diagnostics if a failure occurs. One need only refer to the 4 dual-coloured LEDs, and find the corresponding color code in the instruction manual to diagnose a problem. As well, the K7 Pro possess a range of clock frequencies that make it the most versatile board in its category. That said, let's now take a closer look at the board itself.

The features

First off, it must be mentioned that the MSI K7 Pro uses AMIBIOS v1.21. It'll thus require a bit of time to familiarize oneself to the BIOS, if you haven't used this BIOS system before.

The K7 Pro's expansion capabilities are well-secured by its 6 PCI slots, 1 ISA slot, and AGP port. The K7 Pro also sports 3 168-pin DIMM sockets, that can support upto 768MB of memory.

Configuration of the board is accomplished entirely within the BIOS, as there are no jumpers that relate to configuring the CPU. As for configuring the CPU's frequency, it can be done from the 'Hardware Monitor Setup' menu, which is located within the BIOS, naturally. Effective frequencies are available from between 90MHz, and 150MHz. In fact, frequencies of 90, 95, and 100MHz are made available within the menu, and additional frequencies from between 100MHz, and 125MHz, are made available in steps of 1MHz. A selection of three high-level frequencies of 133MHz, 140MHz, and 150MHz also manages to round things out.

One other thing to note, is that it's possible to adjust the CPU's core voltage from within the very same menu. User's thus have the ability to set the core voltage from between 1.4, and 1.75V, in steps of 0.5V.