MSI K7D Master

The Board

MSI is putting a lot more resources into its marketing than it used to a few years back. Notable changes are design in motherboard boxes and accompanying manuals. Everything MSI produces now seems to ship in shiny boxes with equally metallic looking manuals. This trend of catching the attention of shoppers works quite well as MSI boxes easily catch focus.

MSI K7D Master

No USB ports

Too many heatsinks

The board itself is a relatively simple design without extra features like onboard RAID and Ethernet (although another sku with integrated networking features should be available). In the pictures above you’ll notice that MSI has not used the USB port modules because of the 768 B1 southbridge issue. The K7D Master does come with onboard sound but doesn’t use the better C-Media solutions and instead goes with a host processor based software controller like the Gigabyte GA-7DPXDW.

Looking at the physical features of the board, we notice four rather unattractive heatsinks that are scattered wherever the processor VRMs (voltage regulator modules) are located. The two previous boards in this article have better VRM placement than the K7D Master and it seems that MSI always seems to use either heatsinks for its VRMs or large capacitors that look like they can snap off easily. Overall, the processor section of the K7D Master could have been designed better. Perhaps the resources that are being spent on shiny reflective print paper can be spent elsewhere like engineering for example. The board also requires an ATX12V power supply to operate.

What's printed is true

FSB in a jumper, nice and simple

Space for LAN controller

Configuring

From the pictures above you’ll notice that unbuffered DDR is supported in DDR slots 1 and 2. The strange thing is that K7D Master box has a label that says “Registered DDR Only”. Another feature that stands out is a red jumper on the K7D Mater that allows you to change FSB speeds between 100MHz and 133MHz standard. The other boards in this article feature the same thing but there are more jumpers to set whereas the K7D Master only has one. Also, the K7D Master has the least amount of jumpers to configure of all the boards in this article.

The other only active cooling in this article

NEC is the name of the game

MSI also ships a USB 2.0 controller with 5 ports (1 internal port)