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BIOS and Overclocking Features

The BIOS has some very interesting overclocking features, but it also has some odd limitations. The most noteworthy perk is the fact that you can lock the PCI/AGP speeds independently from the FSB :).

Some of you may notice from the above chart that the K7N2 does not offer any really extreme settings for the CPU Vcore or the multiplier. I like the fact that the CPU Vcore increments in 0.025V increments, but the 1.800V limit, and the inability to exceed your default clock multiplier are limitations I don't like. MSI will release a BIOS that will allow higher FSB settings up to 220Mhz and a CPU Vcore above 1.800, but were not sure what the ETA is on this update.

We did some basic overclock testing, and we found the board to be ok, but not stellar. We were able to push our Thoroughbred "A" 2100+ XP chip to an FSB of 142Mhz @ default clock, but any further and we were met with instability. This isn't to say that you cannot lower the multiplier and achieve increases in speeds by pushing the FSB higher. For instance, you could easily try 166Mhz X 10.5 to get 1743. We also found that while the board is overclock friendly in terms of features, in practice it can become locked in an unstable state. For instance, we pushed the chip and board too hard, and we ended up having a non-working system. We could get into the BIOS but the BIOS would freeze. Using the battery short jumper did nothing, and even removing the BIOS battery altogether required more than one try to set things back to working defaults. A reader reports that you can overcome this situation by switching the FSB jumper to 100Mhz mode, booting your board, saving BIOS settings, and then switching the jumper back to the 133Mhz setting (shutting down and powering as necessary between jumper changes), but I still feel this is an inconvenience.