It seems that manufacturers concentrated their attention on Pentium 4 motherboards but forgot the AMD platform. There are still not many manufacturers that released KT266A based boards although the interest on this market is high. The positive experience we had with Epox 8KHA+ proved that it's possible to have a very good motherboard based on KT266A from the first release. Personally I am surprised why several large players haven't come up yet with motherboards based on the ultimate VIA chipset. Let's hope that in the following months the situation will be different. If you want to buy a KT266A board you will have a limited number of options. We watch closely the motherboard market and I will let you know as soon as other motherboards that deserve to be mentioned appear on retail shelves.
Our experience with MSI motherboards was positive in the past and we had reasons to expect a decent motherboard. But we were also prepared to receive a lot from the MSI mobo after we had seen Epox 8KHA+. The main answer is: Good, but how good can it get?

Product identification

As always, MSI shines from the packaging point of view. Inside the box there are two UDMA100 IDE cables, one floppy cable, three USB brackets (we will see why), an IDE RAID manual, KT266 Pro2 user's guide, one floppy disk with RAID drivers, a CD with chipset drivers and various utils and the motherboard. We tested the MSI K7T266 Pro2 version 2.0 and we don't know anything about other versions of the board. The mobo has five PCI slots, 1 CNR, 1AGP and three DIMM slots. The first minor disadvantage of the board is the presence of only five PCI slots. Around the socket there is plenty of space for a large cooler, in fact we tested the board with Swiftech MC370 and no problem occurred at installation. Two fan headers are quite close to the socket while the third one is located near the front board edge to supply power for a case fan. There are not many capacitors around the CPU socket and it looks like MSI did a last minute change on the voltage regulator design. We will see later how stable is the power supplied by K7T266 Pro2 at the high voltage required by overclocking.

There is a heatsink on KT266A's chip, but MSI didn't add a fan and the thermal interface is assured by thermal tape. Not a good cooling option for an overclocking mobo. The ATX connector is placed in a good position; not the best if you have a small case, but very good for a larger one.

K7T266 Pro 2 comes with the D-Led technology, but the most important motherboard feature is the build in USB 2.0. USB 2.0 is implemented using the NEC USB 2.0 controller. USB 2.0 logic is located near the motherboard's edge and it may be a reason why MSI gave up to add another PCI slot.

We tested the K7T266 Pro2-RU that comes with the RAID controller Promise PDC20265R onboard. There are also versions which do not have RAID onboard. I personally recommend a motherboard without RAID on board if you don't need the RAID function or the extra IDE ports. Don't pay for something you don't need.

The motherboard suffers from DDRAM insertion problems due to the small distance between the AGP slot and the memory slots. But we have to excuse MSI for this because the NEC USB 2.0 controller needs extra space and they found a solution not to make the board larger.

There are no setup jumpers onboard, once again we have to play with a BIOS setup. There are also three USB headers, two USB 2.0 and one USB 1.1 compliant. We can use up to eight USB devices with K7T266 Pro2!
Let's not forget the onboard AC97 Audio, which may raise a potential problem. As you can see from the picture above the CD-Audio connectors are placed in a corner of the motherboard, far away from the CDROM driver. A normal length CDROM audio cable is not long enough if you use a midi or full tower case.