A Closer Look

The 6167 Up Close

It's obvious to see MSI's commitment to quality in the design they chose for the 6167. The most obvious difference between the 6167 and many other Slot A motherboards on the market is the full use of voltage regulators with heatsinks.

While AMD's reference design suggested the full use of voltage regulator chips with heatsinks some designs have either omitted the heatsinks or reduced the number of voltage regulator chips. We're sure the cost-cutting benefits are enormous to manufacturers when dealing with the volume of motherboards shipped, but we're a little skeptical of the stability of any product that cuts corners by skimping on this obvious oversight.

As the picture below illustrates, you can clearly see the eight voltage regulators and accompanying heatsinks present on our 6167 motherboard. We're glad to see that MSI didn't risk the quality and stability of their product by removing the heatsinks or reducing the number of voltage regulator chips with heatsinks.

The 6167 includes 8 voltage regulator chips with heatsinks, unlike many other designs.

Other Features

MSI's BIOS implementation offers nothing special in terms of tweaking features. Much of this fault lies with the Athlon itself, with no form of traditional on-CPU hardware monitoring, Athlon users have no ability to tweak such settings as CPU voltage via the motherboard. While it's rumored that L2 cache divider manipulation will appear in the future, this is by no means present in any Athlon motherboard, and hasn't been announced in upcoming products.

Currently, settings for tweaking the voltage, L2 cache divider, and CPU clock multiplier, are only present on the Athlon cartridge itself. Several companies will modify your Athlon processor for you, as well as sell modified Athlon CPU's running at a certain speed. Another option for interested overclockers is to purchase an Athlon overclocking card. Frequently referred to as a "Golden Fingers Card" these cards can be purchased from a number of online vendors. For the moment, traditional overclocking as we know it (overclocking via the motherboard) is not present for the Athlon platform.

Other notable features include 3 fan headers, (one next to the AGP and Slot A interface, another near the IDE connectors, and the last one located next to the AWARD BIOS chip) the standard 5 PCI/2 ISA slot configuration, and 3 DIMM sockets. Like other Athlon motherboards, the ATX power connector is located next to the Irongate Northbridge, to the left of the third DIMM socket.