Standard equipment on the board is five PCI slots combined with two ISA slots and the mandatory AGP slot. There is no small AMR (Audio Modem Riser) port offered on the MS-6167.

Three DIMM slots are included on the 6167, supporting up to 768MB of ECC SDRAM. We fully expect that the next generation of Athlon mainboards will start their memory support at 1GB, and proceed up to extremely high maximum levels.

As with all mainboards based on the AMD-750 chipset, UDMA/66 support for hard drives is supported fully on the MS-6167. AMD has been very diligent at keeping their busmastering IDE drivers updated, and the newest version installed and ran our Western Digital Expert UDMA/66 drives without hesitation.

The featureset of the MS-6167 may not cause one to swoon from delight, but it does cover the basics of what we've come to expect from high-end desktop mainboards over the past three months.

Installing the MSI mainboard proved to be as easy as installing most 440BX boards. We've commented on this before, but it's still strange inserting the very Pentium II-looking Athlon CPU into any Slot-A mainboard, old memories die hard apparently.

Luckily we experienced no difficulties in setting up the MS-6167 within Windows98, as there were no hardware-related conflicts that popped up throughout the experience. MSI has included a very well done full-sized manual with the MS-6167, which provided detailed photographs and diagrams concerning the board's installation procedure.

Much like the 440BX, i810, and other AMD-750 chipset based mainboards we've tested, the MS-6167 delivered almost identical performance to the newest version of AMD's own Athlon reference mainboard.

As the second generation mainboards debut for the Athlon we'll likely see more options concerning the speed manipulation and control of the EV6 bus as well as the Athlon's L2 cache speed and timing level. This will create differences that the user will appreciate as they seek to maximize performance.

For now the first generation Athlon boards have all been split by only a hair's width in terms of speed differences, less than one percent for the most part.