msi ms-6368 - intel

Approx Price: $40USD

MFG Link: MSI MS-6368 Processor Pentium III Socket 370 Northbridge VIA PLE133T Southbridge VIA 686B Supported FSB 100/133 MHz Form Factor Micro ATX DIMM Slots Two PC100/PC133 Max Memory 1 GB Integrated Video Yes, Trident Blade Shared Video Memory 8MB IDE 2 Ultra/100 AGP None PCI 3 32bit PCI's ISA 1 ISA CNR/AMR/ACR 1 CNR LAN 10/100 Realtek 8100L Audio VIA AC'97 USB 2 USB 1.1 Power Supply Standard ATX Misc 1 Serial, 1 Parallel, WoL, WoM

While the MSI 6368 was the only Intel socket 370 solution that made it into the roundup, the MS-6368 does have its appeal. Based on the well established VIA Apollo 133T chipset it's pretty much guaranteed to be a problem free motherboard. Business and Government users don't mind the lower performance as long as the system is 100% stable. Plus, the cost of socket 370 processors and SDRAM is really right now.

The integrated Trident 3D Blade videocard is a rather limited and won't produce really good readable text at any resolutions higher then 1024x768. Audio was taken care of by VIA's AC'97 codec which produces decent sound for the money. The board also had a 10/100 NIC built in that uses the Realtek 8100L chipset. There were no real goodies with the motherboard, no USB 2.0 and no AGP, but there was an ISA slot for full backwards compatibility with older or existing system hardware.

Being one of the oldest motherboards the MS-6368 was also the cheapest at $75 CDN. When teamed up with a low cost Socket370 Celeron this motherboard is very attractive to people's wallets especially if they need many machines.