Along with FIC, Gigabyte, ASUS, Biostar, and GVC, MSI is one of the original six AMD partners that committed to doing a first generation Athlon mainboard in 1999.
At this year's Comdex show in Las Vegas (Nov 15 - 19) there will be announcements concerning many more mainboard vendors supporting the Athlon, with some of them even teasing Athlon owners by showing off boards based on VIA's KX133 second generation Athlon-supporting chipset.
For now the standard AMD-750 reference design is the norm, and it's the chipset that powers the MS-6167 mainboard.
The AMD-750's basic featureset is delivered via a two-chip solution, which supports the following features:
AMD-751 Irongate Northbridge
200MHz host bus
AGP 2X
PC-100 SDRAM support
PCI 2.2 compliant
ECC support
AMD-756 Viper Southbridge
UDMA/66 on board support
4-port OHCI USB
APM 1.2 compliant
PCI-ISA bridge
Plug and Play support
The AMD-750 is definitely a good mid-step between the aging 440BX chipset and more advanced solutions like Intel's i820 design. However, buyers contemplating Athlon systems may want to hold off on purchasing their new system until the KX133-powered Athlon mainboards arrive on the market in January 2000, complete with their AGP4X and PC-133 SDRAM support.
