The BXMaster is essentially the pinnacle of the Micro-Star BX line, with revisions to correct previous issues, along with features and expandability to spare. Processor support includes Celeron, and Pentium III Coppermine and Katmai CPUs. Coppermine support can be problematic with some BX boards and it's nice to see the word "Coppermine" on the BXMaster spec sheet. The BXMaster also has a 1 AGP/6 PCI/1 ISA slot format, along with four DIMM slots. The 6 PCI slots all support busmaster devices, but PCI slots 1 and 6, and also 3 and 5, share an IRQ. The four DIMM slots also support Table Free memory, enabling SDRAM DIMMS to be installed in any order. This combination makes the BXMaster among the most expandable motherboards you'll find, BX or otherwise. Incredibly, Micro-Star doesn't stop there and also adds a Promise controller chip to support the new ATA-66 standard.

The BXMaster's most innovative feature is the on-board Promise PDC20262 ATA-66 controller. This is the exact same chipset found on the Promise Ultra66 PCI cards. The PDC20262 supports the ATA-66 66MB/sec burst data transfers, improved sequential large file data transfers and the CRC error-checking support of UDMA mode. This is also a different chipset than the High Point HPT366/HPT368 chipsets featured on motherboards like the Abit BE6-II, or dedicated ATA-66 controller cards like those from Iwill.

Apart from the ATA-66 support, the on-board Promise HD controller confers some other benefits. In addition to the four ATA-33 devices supported by the Intel chipset, you can also attach four additional UDMA/33, EIDE, Fast ATA-2, or ATAPI devices to the Promise controller. This can really be a plus for users with a full complement of hard drives, CD, DVD or tape drives already in their PCs. I'm currently in that situation myself, with 2 HDs, a DVD-ROM and CD-RW drive occupying my own system. I would love to add at least one dedicated high-speed CD-ROM for CD-R/RW copying, and perhaps one more hard drive.