[DEAD]MSI KT4VL (KT400) Motherboard, REFURB $39.99 (NEWEGG!)

[AmdEmAll]

Seems like a good for a KT400 motherboard. Has LAN and Audio.

Newegg is running really slow right now...

MSI KT4VL

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: AmdEmAll
Seems like a good for a KT400 motherboard. Has LAN and Audio.

Newegg is running really slow right now...

MSI KT4VL

Interesting. I paid about $100 or so for mine at a computer show in Dec. I made the mistake of buying from somewhere not local, as when I got it home, and with further testing, the LAN performance is horrible. Like, slower than 10MBit ISA NIC horrible. I don't know if that is the way that they all are, or if I just got a bad one (it does work, just slowly). The audio on these boards is "software codec" audio, so it takes CPU time away from games. I've also found out, that it doesn't support a /6 PCI divisor, according to information that I've read, so the effective max FSB speed that you can achieve, without running your PCI out of spec, is 166Mhz. That is the FSB speed of the newest Athlon chips, but they are supposed to move to a 200Mhz FSB in the future, perhaps Barton will run at those speeds. So the fact that the BIOS setup contains options up to 280Mhz in 1Mhz increments, is really just for show, useless in practice.

The only really *good* thing about these mobos, besides being cheap and coming with some of MSI's extra goodies, like the diagnostic "D-Bracket", which has four colored LEDs and can tell you where in POST it dies if it doesn't boot, is that it has SIX, count em, SIX PCI slots. Then again, so does the MSI KT4-Ultra board, which has firewire, serial ATA/RAID, onboard *hardware* sound, Gigabit LAN, and optional Bluetooth features.

But for $40, it's pretty good, much much better than an ECS K7S5A board. The board is of decent build quality and does seem stable at 166Mhz FSB. Combine this with a $50 TbredB Athlon XP1700+/1800+ chip from Newegg, and you will have quite a nice fast basic system.

Oh yeah, these boards support AGP 8x too!

Edit: On the same page linked to by the first post, they also have:

$59.99
REFURBISHED: MSI Motherboard (AMD processors) Model# KT4 Ultra (6590-010)
Audio:C-Media 8738MX 6-channel audio + SPDIF out

$69.00
REFURBISHED: MSI Motherboard for Socket A(Socket 462) AMD processors with Serial ATA RAID Model# KT4 Ultra-SR (6590-020)
Serial ATA Interface (Optional) Promise 20376 controlls 2 Serial ATA ports in 150 MB/s operation mode and 1 Ultra DMA port.
Audio:C-Media 8738MX 6-channel audio + SPDIF out.

$85.50
REFURBISHED: MSI Motherboard for AMD Processors, Model# KT4 Ultra-SR(MS-6590-020)
Serial ATA: Promise 20376 controls 2 Serial ATA ports in 150 MB/s operation mode and 1 Ultra DMA port
Bluetooth: 1 extra pinheader for Bluetooth connect connection
Audio: C-Media 8738MX 6-channel audio + SPDIF out

I'm not sure why they have two different KT4 Ultra-SR models listed, perhaps one includes an extra bracket for the bluetooth or something. AFAIK, all of the KT4 mobos have the mobo headers for it, including the KT4V-L, but don't quote me on that. I would probably spring for the one with Serial-ATA and hardware 6-channel sound if I had to choose, as Serial-ATA will probably become the next big thing, and not having to waste a PCI slot on it is a bonus. Also, the northbridge on the KT4-Ultra line has a fan on it, the KT4V-L only has a small heatsink, this may matter to you if you are planning on pushing your FSB up beyond 166Mhz.

 

[jonno]

not there now