If you go motherboard hunting on EBay, you may run across a lot of these OEM boards. They have a Gateway AMI BIOS, MS-6330 v2.1 printed on the board, and a custom case front panel connector header. The reason you run across a lot of them is because they were manufactured with defective CPU filter capacitors; the aftermarket has been replacing the capacitors and reselling the boards.
The boards shipped with a BIOS that is full of bugs. The 0AAVWP02 BIOS (8/21/2000) most annoyingly has a bug that causes a corrupted IRQ routing table when a PS/2 mouse is not connected. Linux does not handle this corrupted IRQ routing table, and crashes at boot as in this bug report: http://lists.suse.com/archive/suse-linux-e/2002-Nov/0229.html
But, though this is a MSI board (similar to K7T Pro), you cannot use a MSI BIOS on it (MSI does not mention a MS-6330 v2.1 on their site). The key to knowing how to find this BIOS is to know that Gateway's code name for the board is “Oxnard”. Then you can go here: http://support.gateway.com/support/drivers/search.asp?param=oxnard&st=kw in order to download the BIOS (7511677.exe 2/17/2003) The latest BIOS is 0AAVWP13.
If you are trying to figure out how to hook up the front panel or other connectors on the motherboard, go here:
http://support.gateway.com/s/MOTHERBD/MSI/2514182/2514182tc.shtml
http://support.gateway.com/s/MOTHERBD/MSI/2510174/251017422.shtml
These are the OEM specs for the board:
MOTHERBOARD MODEL:
Microstar K7T Turbo MS-6330
CPU SUPPORT:
AMD Athlon up to 1.4 GHz with “A” prefix on CPU
AMD Duron up to 1000 MHz with “D” prefix on CPU
CHIPSET:
VIA KT133A Chipset
VIA VC82C686B Chipset
FSB:
200/266MHz FSB
SYSTEM MEMORY:
3 X 168-pin DIMM sockets for 3.3v SDR-SDRAM
Maximum: 1.5GB
EXPANSIONS SLOTS:
1 AGP slot
5 PCI slots
ON BOARD IDE:
An IDE controller on the VIA VT82C686B chipset provides IDE HDD/CD-ROM with PIO, Bus Master and Ultra DMA 33/66/100 operation modes.
I/O INTERFACE:
1 Serial port
1 Parallel port supports SPP/EPP/ECP mode.
4 USB ports. (2 rear connectors/2 front pin headers)
DIMENSIONS:
ATX Form Factor. 12″ x 8″
BIOS:
AMI BIOS
Plug & Play Flash BIOS
Desktop Management Interface(DMI) function
Thank you so much for this information, I’ve had this board sitting for a couple years because of the bad caps near the cpu socket and it was nice to find your article with the right links and correct information. Hope everyone else finds this article as helpful as I did.