Comments: Bought an XP2400+ late Monday night and received it Thursday afternoon before 2:00. Again, Newegg comes through with the fast Express Saver shipping. I have an older Epox EP-8KHA+ (VIA KT266A chipset w/266FSB) board filled with Crucial PC2100 CAS 2.5 memory and an XP2000+. I was considering upgrading everything but am glad I didn't. Instead I bought a retail boxed XP2400+ (AIXHB stepping), flashed my BIOS and overclocked it to 2.3GHz stable (15 x 154FSB) using a Thermaltake Volcano 6Cu+. I'm certain that combined with a newer infrastructure (333 or 400 FSB) it would clock even faster. I was able to extend the life of my aging system and can now run office apps at or near the speeds of the XP3200+ Barton and 3.2GHz Pentium 4C. What a gem of a processor. Need I say more?

Pros: Good basic board for everyday use, such as internet and office apps. Nice upgrade if you have an older Socket A setup and don't want to buy a new video card and memory. Plenty of PCI slots.

Cons: The built-in ethernet adapter has died already. If not for that I would have given it 4 or 5 stars. Bought the motherboard in August and the controller died in mid-October. Also, the location of the SATA connections is not the greatest. I'm not going to claim the socket 754 as a con because I knew that it was outdated when I purchased this board.

Overall Review: The system was not stable with the nVidia IDE drivers. I'm using the Microsoft default drivers and it works much better. Also, be sure you have XP with SP2 built in before trying to install to a SATA drive or a large hard drive. Had some problems initially with a 400GB Seagate drive but once I slipstreamed SP2 into XP and used that to do a fresh install everything worked fine. Other than the built-in ethernet dying I'm happy with the board. Newgg offered to replace it but I don't want to screw around with it and pay the shipping. It's just easier to slap in an old 3Com card into one of the many PCI slots. In retrospect I should have gone with a Gigabyte GA-K8NSC-939 board.

Comments: Also, according to MSI's web sight, the K7T Turbo2 (6330 Version 5) is BIOS flashable to support an XP 2600+. Combine with some less expensive PC133 and this is a great Office/web surfing machine. A friend of mine just bought one of these for his wife's machine, although he got it for much less somewhere else. Too bad the prices have gone up for a board based on such an old chipset. It may be better to get a newer board based on the KT400 as it will have more features and (hopefully) support the 0.13 Barton CPU when it comes out next year.

Comments: As of today, October 27, 2002 NewEgg is selling this board (ver 1.3) for $78 shipped. This seems a little high for a 2 year old board, especially when you can get a Gigabyte GA-7VAXP KT400 based solution that is packed with features, such as USB 2.0, firewire, RAID, ATA133, 6 chanel audio and 333 FSB support However, this is a very nice board from Abit. I have one with an XP 2000+ and 768MB of Crucial PC133 CL2 memory. Sitting right next to it is a KT266A based Epox 8KHA+ board with an XP 2000+ and 768MB of Crucial PC2100 DDR memory. I can't tell any difference in speed between the two systems in every day usage. Also, this board maxes out at an XP 2100+, whereas an MSI K7T Turbo2 (6330 Ver. 5) will support an XP 2600+ with a BIOS flash. The Turbo2 has built-in audio but no RAID. That's pretty impressive for a KT133A based board.