Let us continue our investigation of the nearest Socket A future. This time I have found out on
this site that MSI had started supplying its VIA KT400 based product announced back in April (see
this news-story). The company continues to use its usual naming structure, the brand of the novelty is KT4 Ultra. The specifications of the newcomer are not something extraordinary for a high-end and expensive mainboard announced these days, though, I will present them for you:
- Supports Socket A Athlon XP/Athlon/Duron processors;
- VIA KT400 chipset with VT8235 I/O Controller;
- 3 DIMM slots for up to 4GB of DDR SDRAM; No word about DDR400 support, so, until MSI makes it clear, we should consider only PC1600, PC2100 and PC2700 memory support;
- 6 PCI and 1 AGP 8x slot;
- 2-channel integrated ATA/133 controller plus external Promise PDC20376 controller allowing to plug two additional Parralel ATA and one Serial ATA devices;
- BCM5702 10/100/1000Mbit/s BASE-T controller with integrated transceiver from Broadcom;
- 6 USB 2.0 ports;
- IEEE 1394 support via VT6306 controller;
- Integrated sound-controller from C-Media;
- Supports all the adjustment features the latest mainboards from MSI can offer (PC Alert III; Fuzzy Logic 4; Live BIOS, etc).
The PCB design of KT4 Ultra is very similar to that of its predecessor with all the disadvantages we mentioned in our
review:
- The ATX power supply connector is placed just behind the Socket A, that is why the power supply cable will be hanging above the processor cooler inside the PC case thus hindering proper CPU cooling;
- The Socket A is moved so close to the mainboard edge that once the device is installed into the case the user will be unable to reach the cooler retention mechanism clips.
- The AGP graphics card blocks the DIMM slots clips.
- Too many connectors on the left (or should I say, lower?) side of the board just next to the PCI slots.
At this very moment I have no additional information on pricing and availability of this product. Please stay tuned to learn these details first.
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