The details

IDE Support

Like the K7T Pro2-A, the K7T Turbo-R features VIA's 686B chip for native support of the ATA/100 protocol. One new addition however is the Promise 20265R controller for IDE RAID support. In particular, the Promise controller supports RAID Level 0 or 1 (no 0+1 support).

Strangely enough, the only way to run a single hard drive on the Promise controller is to create a RAID array. Traditionally, other motherboards have allowed the use of a single hard drive on the RAID controller without having to do this. Fortunately, the procedure for creating the array is simple, but it still caught us off guard, we'd never created a RAID array with a single drive before! Obviously, the array we'd setup wasn't an array in the traditional sense, but at least we were able to run a single hard drive off the Promise controller. In any case, with the onboard Promise controller, the K7T Turbo-R can support up to eight hard drives.

Other than the addition of the Promise controller and the VT8363A North Bridge, the K7T Turbo-R remains unchanged from the K7T Pro2-A.

Test system up and running

Another shot of our system running during testing

266MHz and up!

With the KT133A chipset's ability to run at bus speeds well in excess of 133MHz, MSI uses a jumper to toggle the range of bus speeds available for adjustment within system BIOS. If you're using a 133MHz processor, simply remove the J17 jumper to open bus speeds between 133MHz and 166MHz (in 1MHz increments). With J17 in place, bus speeds between 100MHz and 132MHz are the only options available. Just like the KT133 chipset, at speeds between 100 and 132MHz, the memory bus and system bus can run asynchronously (i.e. the system bus runs at 100MHz while the memory bus runs at 133MHz) At speeds of 133MHz and higher, the system bus and memory bus operate at the same clock speed.

Other goodies

Also included in the K7T Turbo-R packaging are two user manuals (one for the motherboard and the other for setting up the RAID array with the Promise controller), IDE and floppy cables, and a 2-port USB bracket. Like previous MSI motherboards, the K7T Turbo-R supports MSI's Fuzzy Logic 3 (for overclocking) and Live BIOS (for flashing the BIOS within Windows) utilities.