Let's take a look at some synthetic and gaming numbers first... The Hot Hardware Test System Better each day... 1GHz AXIA T-Bird @ 1000MHz. & 1430MHz (Thanks PCNut!) MSI K7T266 Pro 128MB Crucial PC2100 DDR-SDRAM GeForce 2 Ultra (12.41 Drivers) Sound Blaster Live! Netgear FA310 NIC IBM 7200RPM 30GB HD Creative Labs 52X CD-Rom Standard Floppy Drive Windows Millennium Edition DirectX 8.0a Via 4-in-1s v.4.32   Performance Wait until you see these...

We ran our usual suite of benchmarks with the K7T266 Pro.  First up we have our SiSoft Sanda 2001 results:

SiSoft Sandra:

At 1GHz (1000MHz) the CPU tests show our system performing right on par with Sandra's reference numbers as expected.  Our overclocked numbers were excellent, besting every reference system listed.  Our CPU was hand picked by our friends at PCNut, with air cooling, at default voltage we were able to hit an excellent, rock-solid 43% overclock! 

We see the same thing in Sandra's Multi-Media tests.  Our system was on par with the reference numbers at it's default clockspeed, but when overclocked we annihilated every other system listed.

Now for what you've probably been waiting for...

These memory scores are phenomenal!  Although the Pentium 4 systems equipped with RDRAM outperform our Athlon / DDR test-bed, the numbers posted by the KT266 are still excellent.  We should mention these scores were attained at a 143MHz FSB, CAS 2, 1T with 4-Way interleaving enabled.  If you've seen performance numbers posted on some other review sites, you'll notice that with the current BIOS revision performance with the KT7266 Pro is greatly enhanced.

Hard Drive performance is on par with other motherboards we have tested using these same hard drives.  Notice the huge performance boost to be gained by setting up a RAID 0 array with the ob-board Promise controller.

QUAKE 3:

No review would be complete without some gaming performance.  We ran Quake 3's built-in Demo001 timedemo at low resolution to demonstrate CPU performance.  For the remainder of testing we'll be comparing the MSI K7T266 Pro to the Abit KT7A-RAID we recently reviewed.  All tests were with a single hard drive (no RAID).

Now that the KT266 has matured a bit, it seems the KT133A has finally met it's match!  Early reports showed the KT266 lagging behind the KT133A, I guess a little maturity goes a long way...