PCB Design

From my point of view, the PCB design of MSI KT4A Ultra-SR is not bad, though there is nothing really remarkable about it. It has a few definite advantages, but at the same time is not free from some upsetting drawbacks. Among the advantages we would like to mention very convenient positioning of the connectors for the rear panel brackets of the PC case, namely for the USB, D-Bracket and S-Bracket (the KT4A Ultra-FISR mainboard model will also get FireWire connectors).  All connectors for these brackets are located closer to the back edge of the PCB, so that the cables will lie quietly at the bottom of the case and will rise up to the connectors only at the brackets, which will also cause absolutely no problems, as there will be no PCI cards in the corresponding slots. The only thing I don’t quite understand is why the cables are so long, especially those of the D-Bracket. But this doesn’t matter, as they will never leave the bottom of the case, for sure. The S-Bracket cable is also a bit too long, I would say. By the way, the user’s manual says that the only USB connector available on the mainboard serves for connection to the USB ports of the case. Nevertheless, as I have already said the bracket with the additional USB ports is supplied with the mainboard.

Now I have to mention a few things, which disappointed me a little bit, as far as the PCB design is concerned. To begin with, the ATX power supply connector is located in the upper part of the PCB, very close to the edge (besides, there is no additional 12V power supply connector). As a result, you will have to tie up the power cable into a very tight loop, which will definitely hinder the air circulation inside the case, and may even get into the processor cooler fan. Besides, there are three pretty tall capacitors next to the power supply connector, which can be very easily damaged when plugging in the ATX power cable and especially when unplugging it.

The FDD connector is also located not in the best way. In fact, it is pretty nice that they placed it in front of the DIMM slots, however, its close location to the IDE connectors may cause certain problems when plugging/unplugging the FDD cable and IDE cables too, in case both IDE connectors are occupied. And one more thing about the DIMMs: the installed AGP graphics card will make it a really hard task to install or remove the DIMM modules from the slots, even if the card is not a long one, but of a regular size like RADEON 9700 Pro, for instance.

The CPU power supply circuit is a dual-channel one, which means that MSI KT4A Ultra is no overclocker’s product, because all overclocking-friendly solutions usually use three-channel or even four-channel power supply. The memory power supply circuit also doesn’t push us to think about overclocking, because it is linear and not pulse. However, we are going to go into details about overclocking in the next section of our review. So, read on!