Introduction

MSI's support for the AMD Athlon platform has been one of, if not the biggest and most diverse you will ever find in any company today. MSI has released boards for the Athlon, every time bringing a new improvement to either the chipsets that support it or the processor itself.

MSI started its AMD line back in the AMD 750 days with one of the few boards that actually had AMD's 750 northbridge and AMD's 756 southbridges combined together. This board was totally un-overclockable, unless you had a goldfinger (GFD) device (no FSB settings whatsoever were available) but was one of the most stable boards, even with the AMD 750 AGP problems.

MSI skipped the KX133 stage with information leaked about the Socket A platform, requiring a new chipset. VIA's release of the KT133 for the Socket A platform saw MSI take off on what has been a non-stop supply of AMD based motherboards ever since.

MSI's KT2 Pro was released with the KT133 northbridge and VIA 686A southbridge. This board was an FSB only overclocker and very little was achievable due to the KT133's very poor FSB overclocking ability. With ASUS and ABIT adding multiplier overclocking options onto their boards, MSI followed soon after with the K7T Pro 2. This board was the same as the Pro1 but yielded better overclocking results. The Pro 2 only saw about three or four days of life before VIA released the 686B southbridge - As a direct result, MSI updated the Pro2 to support this new Southbridge and named it the Pro2A.

MSI were fairly quiet in their products launches, that was until the KT133A was given the go ahead and MSI went to work updating the Pro2A to support the new VIA chipset, this began the K7T Turbo boards and what a super overclocker they were. MSI, at the same time, additionally released DDR SDRAM based boards on the AMD 760, VIA KT266, KT266A and even the nVidia N-Force chipsets.

Now with VIA's KT333 chipset alive and kicking bringing DDR-333 support for the Athlon, MSI has released yet another board in its AMD chapter, introducing the KT3 Ultra ARU, which we will be telling you all about today.