well im back up and running after a week offline my 30 gig maxtor 7,200rpm 2mb cache hd died on me due to bad sectors and well since i was going out to get a new hd western digital i thought i would buy a new mobo.

old mobo was a kt333 dragon ultra

new mobo is a msi kt400 ultra+ with serial ata and 100/1000 lan by a company called promise.
its got a nice fsb of 333 and will go higher with future bios updates it will also take a athlon xp 2800+ tones of overclocking featurse as well.
its also faster at booting up than my other board it ws cheap as well.

thanx for reading.

BTW came very close to buying an ABIT board but it was like £65 more than what i paid for this board.

A gigabit nic?

I thought they were like £100 on there own..

Good to see you back online, now all we have to is wait for Scruffynuts.

i wouldent know about the nic prices.But i did try overclocking my athlon xp1800 from 1.53 to 1.56

the fsb ranges from 100mhz to 280mhz set it to 133=my chip 1.53ghz so i changed it to 136 to get the 1.56ghz give me 300 xtra points in benchmark 2001 se.
Then i went silly put it to 200mhz lol my monitor wouldent come on at all i had to take the battery out of the mobo to reset the bios to its original defaults lol. dont think ill try that again.

lol, you wont get 200mhz FSB without some class RAM and some serious cooling.

You should be able to get 166mhz with a decent HS and fan though.

well i got a zalman cooler and 756meg of ddr ram so i thought that might help. i guess the chip locks up at a certain fsb.

What little difference overclocking makes isn't worth the trouble

has it happens im in need of a little help from u later ill post here when i get the time

here is the link to a review of this motherboard i will state that its not the best you can buy but for the money it is the best you can buy.

BTW there are optional things with this board were as i have ide3 with serial support there is a cheaper version of this mobo without the extras.

http://www.a1-electronics.co.uk/AMD_Section/Mobo_DDR/KT400/MSI_KT4Ultra.shtml

Well after a week of using this mobo i give it 8 out of 10

so here is the updates shiva.

Only locked up on me once this week.
i overclocked my athlon 1800 xp from 1.53ghz 133fsb to 1.68ghz 147fsb i think that was but anyway thats as high as i can go before it becomes unstable.

The FSB can go all the way to 280mhz so that gets 10/10
u can overclock the memoryno problem

it comes with the usual driver disc
Live bios update2 which gets 10/10 no messing with dos here
Fuzzy logic 4 that is like a temperature monitor and it will overclock u r cpu for u automatically while on u r desktop no need to mess with the bios it will slowly increase the FSB till the machine resets at that point. u can run the machine at that fsb all the time stabily.

Down sides are
5.1 onboard sound is still crap
mobo is that fast a booting up it doesent always give the cpu fan a chance to fully speed up and it thinks it hasent come on so it pauses on boot up asking if u wish to ignore or shutdown. It doesnt always do this though just randomly.

apart from that top marks.

To add to overall performance, VIA also increased the rate at which the Northbridge and Southbridge communicate. With the KT266A and KT333 chipsets, the maximum rate of communication was 266MBs per second. The design of the KT400 has been improved to double the rate at which the Northbridge and Southbridge communicate to 533MBs per second..

thanx for reading.

sounds like a nice mobo