The MS-6341 K7 Master board from Microstar MSI is another ATX form factor board and very similar in layout to the Gigabyte board, but this one has an AMD 761 chipset that supports Direct Sound AC97 Audio. Connections for this are situated on the rear panel along with the normal serial and parallel I/O ports.

This board has four RAM slots and can handle up to a whopping 4GB of DDR-DIMM (dual data rate memory) using eight effective memory banks. These run at 266MHz and must herald the end of Intel's attempts to force us down the RIMM (RAMBUS) memory path.

The onboard IDE controller can use UltraDMA/ATA drives working at up to UltraDMA/ATA-100 speeds, so you'll be able to use some of the fastest IDE drives that are available. We found that overall performance from this board was way ahead of anything we've seen using the Pentium III or IV processor.

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With UltraDMA/ATA-100 support and up to four USB sockets this board gives real value for money. AMD appears to be heading for 1GHz as an entry level for its processor range and the combination of that sort of power with this type of board must be starting to rattle the competition. Other features present here include a Communications riser slot and the usual audio and game port connections on the rear panel.

The fact that this board uses DDR memory and the AMD 761 chipset places it firmly at the forefront of Socket A motherboard technology, and it's likely to be at the heart of many fast Athlon-based PCs.

For the full specification of this board, see the Features table.