Microstar K7Pro AMD 750 Slot-A ATX

AnandTech Motherboard Rating

Performance

The K7Pro much like other AMD 750 based boards, so it's just average.

Price

The K7Pro is actually the only 4 layer AMD 750 board that we've seen to date. That helps keep costs down and current prices show it to be cheaper than the similar ASUS K7M by about $20.

Stability

We found the K7Pro to be one of the most stable boards available for the Athlon platform. It's not exactly rock solid, but still very good.

Quality

No complaints on quality with K7 Pro - everything was of the highest quality as we've come to expect from MSI. However, this is fairly typical among Athlon motherboards, so the rating here is only a bit above average.

Features

With 6 PCI slots, core voltage adjustments in the BIOS, and a plethora of FSB speeds, the K7Pro looks very good.

Remember that the K7Pro is based on the aging AMD 750 chipset, which does not support PC133 SDRAM or AGP 4X. We won't penalize the K7Pro for this lack of features since it's really a chipset issue, but it should be noted.

Layout

A few complaints here - the ATX power connector could prevent the use of large heatsinks, while the primary IDE connector prevents the use of full length cards in 3 of the 6 PCI slots.

Availability

Like other motherboard manufacturers, it's not possible to find MSI boards in any large national chain. However, they are relatively easy to find around the web and even in some local computer shops. We had no trouble locating a K7Pro online.

Documentation & Software Bundle

Nothing particularly special here, but we at least get a hard copy of the manual from MSI, which is more than we can say for some companies.