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It is a strange beast, this MSI KT3-Ultra Deluxe Edition. It is wrapped like a candy at Christmas, comes with a ton of accesories like a Barbie doll and looks like a painted OEM board with a body kit. The BIOS is similarly confusing in that quite a few of the auto configuration mechanisms apparently don't work. For a lot of users this means that they will be putting away at very safe settings with a healthy performance hit but a ton of stability to build upon. Other users who are more daring will run into issues with the "High Performance" settings that are not quite kosher either.

Most of the individuals falling into either category will believe that they are very happy campers and it is the believe that moves mountains, even if reality may prove otherwise.

And then, there is the third group of those who actually have some idea of what they are doing and who don't care about the preconfigured coctail settings. For those, the KT3 is the diamond at the bottom of the cracker jack box, you gotto find it but let's face it, there are few boards out there that will sustain frequencies like the KT3 does. The fact that some performance has to be traded in by opting for less aggressive settings is negligible in view of the fact that 200 MHz FSB are simply one of the coolest things to show off and I am not excluding myself here. This is an accomplishment and we won't belittle it.

So, what's the final verdict? Is the KT3 good, bad, somewhere in between? The answer is up to whoever wants to buy it and what the needs are. There is no support for the Memory Stick or the Secure Digital media, there is no real hardware audio, there is no integrated network controller. Instead, there are RAID, AC97 and USB 2.0. And there is some potential ...., quite honestly, I personally like the KT3.

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