Related Articles

In terms of the BIOS, MSI has more often than not preferred to use the AMI (American MegaTrends Incorporated) style of BIOS. It works, but I for one quite prefer the Phoenix Award system. I just feels better. But, this AMI style of BIOS reminds me of the Award system and was incredibly easy to use.

MSI was even kind enough to indicate the type of BIOS used with this little sticker they slapped onto the P35 Platinum motherboard.

Another spaceship for MSI's graphical boot screen (the claws from the box would have been nice). Looks way better than the verbose boot and all of that text flying by. We don't need to see that, do we?

The basic introductory screen, giving us all of those expected system setup choices.

The standard CMOS features of date and time, basic system info (CPU speed, BIOS revision, and allocated memory).

The advanced BIOS features page is just that, advanced features. Most are useless, say except for the boot sequence.

Integrated peripherals for these things such as USB, LAN, Audio and so forth.

Power management for things like power management. Makes sense right?.

The PnP/PCI Configuration page is one of the more advanced features sets within a BIOS. It allows for a little extra tweaking of things such as the PCI slots and IRQ's (Interrupt Requests). But honestly, I haven't played with IRQ's since my 80486 days. They're pretty much all automatic now, but still useful if you would ever need them.

Every BIOS has a hardware monitor. Here we have fan speeds and temperatures. Important Note: System temps will always read higher than normal in the BIOS since there is some small amount of communications between the CPU, memory, and chipset occurring at all times (simply saying hello all the time to check if each other is there). It's not a true idle state, so take these readings in stride, double check with a desktop hardware monitoring tool.

Here we go, the Cell Menu. This is the overclocking utility that MSI equips all of their motherboards with, or the ones that deserve it at least. Here we can tweak and tune everything from our FSB frequency, up voltage levels, set the memory SPD timings, and so much more.

A quick check of the available voltage levels has all of these power options:

Wow, all of those voltage tweaks are pretty sweet, especially the VCore for the processor, though 2 Volts worth of juice will require some pretty hefty cooling. I'm talking refrigeration here. And the broad selection of memory voltages is nice too.   

The advanced DRAM configuration is important and it does give us more than the basic options for CAS and three RAS settings. The extra five options are nice, but make a negligible difference in the long run. And as you may have noticed, there is no option to set the memory command rate from 1T to 2T, so it defaults to 2T automatically. The 1T option would be nice, but very few DDR2 memory modules will support it.

Within the Cell Menu we have the D.O.T. Control (Dynamic Overclocking Technology) menu. This is kind of a treat, since it does help to provide some small measure of automated overclocking for the FSB, the PCI-e, or both. 

By activating the D.O.T. Control, we can select a number or automatic presets for our overclocking exploits. Nice, but I think we'd rather overclock the old fashioned way.

The FSB/Memory Ratio options are interesting, and do take some of the guess work out of overclocking your memory modules. But conversely, it locks your memory speed in relation to the Front Side Bus speed. There's an easy explanation, but it involves some math. Don't worry, it's very simple.

An FSB of 1333MHz is actually an FSB of 333MHz times 4. For memory, it's doubled. So 800MHz memory is actually 400MHz time two. If we apply a 1:1 FSB/Memory Ratio then we have a quad pumped 333MHz FSB and memory running at 333MHz times two, giving us 666MHz memory speeds on a 1333MHz FSB. A 1.5 ration would have our memory at (333x1.5)x2=999, for 999MHz memory speeds on that same 1333MHz FSB.

I know it's a little confusing, and I would have greatly preferred that MSI had used the tried and true method of memory overclocking. Having it locked in the ratio form is kind of a pain, but it still works. Perhaps subsequent BIOS revisions from MSI may allow for some more independent memory tweaks that aren't locked to the FSB frequency.

Yes, I think I will.