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BIOS
Mmm, more AWARD based KT400A standard goodness. MSI's own tweaks give you the following adjust: front side bus adjust (well over 200MHz on the sample, eek), Vdimm from 2.5 to 2.8V, Vagp from 1.5 to 1.8V (not again) and Vcore to 1.85V from 1.65V base. There's also a curious setting for adjusting DDR termination voltage. I assume this allows you fine tuning over the bus signalling between the memory controller and the physical memory modules. However I didn't adjust it from the default setting of Auto, however 1.27V and 1.29V are available as selections.
Bundle
MSI are traditionally strong in this area, offering up a myriad of extras along with their boards, especially on 'Ultra' designated models. The KT4A Ultra is no exception and you get a fine array of bits to get you going. 2 orange SATA data cables show that MSI's focus on disk connectivity for this board is Serial ATA. You only get a single, red, rounded PATA cable for hooking up older drives, plus the obligatory floppy cable too. A D-Bracket module housing a single USB2.0 port, the Bluetooth transceiver and their 4 dual colour LED cluster for POST monitoring and diagnosis. You get all the codes in the manual for easy reference of what's going on during the boot sequence. It makes for an interesting christmas tree effect on bootup at any rate, all things working well and stopping on 4 reassuring green LED's.
A guide to the Promise controller makes an appearance too, topped off by a bracket holding the extra speaker ports (including optical and coax SP-DIF outputs).
A driver disk for the Promise to let you install your OS to it natively, plus the obligatory driver CD (which holds a decent range of useful utilities) wrap things up bundle wise. Overall, a good package for the retail customer.
Manual
At the risk of sounding monotonous, despite being shiny, it's just a well written and organised manual. The BIOS in particular is covered well, along with the audio setup via the C-Media hardware. Everything is easy to find. A typical MSI effort, flashy cover and good content. There's a Harry Potter joke in there somewhere if you think hard enough.
Midway Conclusion
An impressive showing from MSI at the midway point of its coverage. Only the lack of an Ethernet port let it down for me, the rest of it I'm taken with. Good presentation, features, bundle and layout. The colour scheme is mildly irritating to say the least, but aesthetics are all personal taste so I can't remove marks for it making me vomit.
By my calculations, that makes it time to cover the final board in the roundup before we move on to collective benchmarking heaven. Here comes the Soltek.
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