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More Slot-A compatible Athlon mainboards are arriving on North American shores from some of the most well respected names in the mainboard business.

Today we're taking a look at one of the better Athlon boards we've seen. It's from MicroStar Incorporated, or MSI.

MSI has been releasing some very hot products lately, including one of the best 440BX mainboards, the MS-6163Pro. Likewise, the AMD Athlon CPU has also gained a tremendous amount of momentum over the past few months, achieving good overall sales volume that's expected to surpass one million CPUs by the end of 1999.

The challenge for mainboard vendors attempting to provide Athlon mainboard solutions mainly boils down to two issues:

First, stability must a primary concern, particularly when it concerns the complex DDR 200MHz EV6 bus that the Athlon CPUs run on.

Second, the boards must maintain a good price to performance ratio in order to keep the Athlon boards within the range of less expensive i820 and 440BX-based mainboards that utilize Intel CPUs.

MSI's MS-6167 Athlon mainboard successfully satisfies both of these requirements, while also throwing a few surprises into the mix. Let's take an in-depth look at the first Slot-A product from MSI, and decide whether it should be the mainboard you partner your Athlon CPU with.