Manufacturer:
Price: $150



Introduction

Today we are putting one of MSI's bestsellers through the torturing we tend to put on motherboards, namely the MSI KT266 Pro. MSI was one of the first manufacturers to release a socket A motherboard that was capable of using DDR memory, and they did a pretty good job with it too. Although this motherboard was released some months ago, we did not review it until today because of two reasons: in the mere beginning of its career, the KT266 Pro was having memory problems and there were two versions floating around the net, both offering different memory scores due to the lack of a resistor on one of both versions. The second reason is that our board was very unstable with the first BIOS and we didn't think it was a good idea to review the board when it was lacking a good BIOS. Almost two weeks ago, MSI has released a new BIOS update for the KT266 Pro, revision 1.6, and this update turned the board from a unstable computer component into a rockstable piece of hardware. This changed our view on the board and we decided to give it a go and post our review.



As you know there are two chipsets available for the socket A platform that support DDR memory: VIA's KT266 chipset and AMD's 760 chipset. Like the name predicts, MSI has chosen to use the VIA chipset on this board. Although VIA is about to release a new revision of this chipset, the KT266A, there is no reason to state that this board would be a waste of PCB. Not everyone out there needs/wants the lastest hardware, so this MSI board would be a very intresting buy, especially since the prices of KT266 products will drop with the release of the KT266A coming closer!

So how did the KT266 Pro perform? How did it behave in our testing, and more important is it worth your hard earned cash? Let's read on and find out soon!