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VIA's KT333 chipset has conquered the market in a Blitzkrieg, leaving very little room for competitors. Now the battle is on amongst the winners, that is which mainboard manufacturer will get the biggest chunk of the pie. After looking at the ASUS and Shuttle boards, we are tearing apart the latest "Deluxe" edition from MSI. How much of the KT3 is just candy wrapper, where are the hidden corners that have been cut, where are the bugs and last not least, is is worth any serious consideration? Are these questions leading the witnesses?

Microstar International is certainly not a company that needs any introduction. We have worked with them for about 5 years and aside from always having been one of the top companies with respect to quality, MSI and their products have been ground-breakers for new chipset technologies more than most other companies. The rather long list of milestone achievements encompasses the MS 5961, first board ever running at 100 MHz FSB, as well as such legendary boards as the BX-Master, a board that stood out from the uniformity of the BX-chipset boards like none other. Add the 6167 as the first Athlon production board and it should be clear that Microstar is one of the fore-runners of technology amongst the Taiwanese ensemble of mainboard manufacturers

Uniformity is one of the main problems faced by the PC component manufacturers, meaning that if there are no distinguishing features of a given product, there will be a dozen or more similar offerings at very competitive pricing which also means no profit margins. The consequence is that most manufacturers will have to come up with something that offsets their products from the masses. Color is cheap and it is eye-catching, however, how many whiter shades of pale can be used for branding. Colored PCBs cannot be patented either and consequently everybody else can jump on the same bandwagon.

Opening the MSI KT3-Ultra Deluxe Edition box is comparable only to unwrapping Christmas presents, lots of toys inside

Packaging and features are the next issue and we thought we had seen it all, from a brown box to the futuristic designs Iwill-style. Somewhere in between are the exercises in Origami with elaborately folded cardboard boxes a la Soyo, and the only thing missing is the metallic finish of Christmas ornaments. And then, we laid our eyes on the MSI box.

A combination of all of the above together with a low price point, quality and performance made possible by "offshore" manufacturing (speak mainland China) is an almost bullet-proof recipe for success, teaming up with a few key partners in the industry like AMD or nVidia has not hurt either. It is all a matter of using any resources with the highest efficiency and MSI, dealing the right cards left and right have excelled in this game. Thus, it is not surprising that MSI has become one of the biggest heavyweights in the scene almost over night.

The VIA KT333 has become the chipset of choice for any AMD mainboard and the competition in form of ASUS, EpoX, Gigabyte and Shuttle, just to mention a few is very strong. Does the KT3-Ultra RU (Deluxe Edition) have what it takes to pull ahead once again?

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