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More BIOS

The "H/W Monitor" screen does a good job of showing us the "vitals" of the system:

• CPU Temperature
• Motherboard Temperature
• CPU Fan Speed
• System Fan Speed
• CPU Vcore
• actual voltage on the 3.3V line
• actual voltage on the 5.0V line
• actual voltage on the 12V line
• actual voltage on the 5.0V Southbridge line

I wish they showed the actual DDR and Northbridge voltages too.

I like it that MSI has added two save-able user profiles (ie saves all your BIOS settings so you can restore them even after having to clear the CMOS) - but I am greedy, and I wish there were more profiles.

Now we get to the important stuff... the Cell menu!

As you can see, all the overclocking controls are placed here. The first thing I did was to disable the automagic "D.O.T" dynamic overclocking and Intel's EIST (I'd rather have top performance over saving a bit of electricity). Then I disabled the "Spread Spectrum" control, and started setting up the system for the stock tests.

These days, I prefer to test at 333MHz x 8, with 1000-4-4-4-12 memory timings. For DDR3 I use 1333-7-7-7-20, as DDR3-1066 would be slaughtered by DDR2-1000.