Their K7T Pro, a VIA KT133 board, is heading straight for the high-end with its six PCI slots and one AGP slot matched to ATA/100. Since VIA is currently not offering an ATA/100 solution, the K7T Pro will use a Promise IDE RAID card that provides RAID 0, 1, and 0+1. A K7T Pro with a 1GHz AMD Thunderbird and a striped RAID made from a couple of Seagate Barracuda ATA II drives would be quite the speed demon. MSI will also have i815 and i815e models, the 815 Pro and 815E Pro, and an Apollo 133A model, the 694D Pro, which will also have ATA/100.

MSI has built up a wide variety of features for their boards, features that set MSI boards apart from the competition. Fuzzy Logic 2 is a soft overclocking utility slated for release in the end of June. It comes with an automatic overclocking option that finds how far your system can be overclocked without you having to do the dirty work. Live BIOS allows live updates of your BIOS over the internet. Live BIOS will download the newest BIOS off the web and flash your system without having to exit to DOS and run an arcane BIOS flashing program.

SD-LED is a series of four LEDs that, in various combinations of lighting, tell you if there is a problem with a component in your system. There will also be certain versions that speak the problem through your PC speaker. PC Aleve III provides PC monitoring on temperature, voltage and more, and can also cool down your processor by taking CPU time then doing nothing. CPU PnP III lets you adjust CPU voltage in software. And Bus Racing is a manual soft overclocking utility.

On the video card side, AOpen is going all NVIDIA. Of course, so is almost everybody else. With ATI, Matrox and 3dfx keeping their technology to themselves, Taiwan makers haven't much choice as to what cards they can make. SiS products are low-end, which means low margins, and it doesn't look like anyone wants to bet on S3's products either. AOpen will have, like most everyone else, a 32MB and a 64MB GeForce2 GTS.