While I have not had the opportunity to test many MSI motherboards, their BIOS has always been pretty solid. MSI seems to find a nice calm between the OC and Stability camp. Surprisingly, even the P6NGM, a mATX motherboard, is no exception to this.

Your intro screen into the BIOS is something most of us are familiar with, nothing out of the ordinary here for an AMI based motherboard. The same goes for the Standard CMOS Features and the Advanced Features pages. Lets take a closer look at that “Frequency/Voltage Control” section shall we?

Within the Frequency/Voltage Control menu we can manipulate many aspects of how our system operates, from CPU performance to memory tweaks and OnBoard device configuration. This mATX motherboard gives you many of the tweaks you would think only a full blown ATX motherboard would offer. Things such as Memory Voltage adjustments, detailed memory timing adjustments and of course CPU stepping adjustments.

Notes / Observations

Driver Installation went smoothly, Vista, now at over a year old, is waining on having all of the drivers built into the DVD from MS itself. Luckily, as mentioned earlier, MSI is shipping a Vista driver CD so you can promptly get your system going.

While many motherboard manufacturers are starting to introduce BIOS update menus from USB Flash Disk directly within the BIOS, this MSI motherboard does not have that ability. Surprisingly, the manual does not cover how to update your BIOS at all.

Updating the BIOS from within MS Vista was easy enough (using the included Utility LiveUpdate), interesting in that when I ran the update, it asked if I wanted to perform this through a DOS boot disk or within windows, I must say this made me ponder how safe it was to run under windows. I let it do its thing from within Vista (its actually from a command prompt) and it performed the update without issue. Unfortunately the Update did not fix my inability to increase the Video RAM from the default 64MB.

Test System

MSI P6NGM , 2GB SuperTalent PC2-8000, Intel Xeon 3050 (C2D @ 2.13GHz), On-Bd nVidia GeForce 7150, Seagate 320GB, 8MB buffer, 7200RPM, SATA-II Drive, Windows Vista Home Premium

Comparison System

I am comparing the P6NGM to the previously reviewed Asus P5W DH Deluxe Motherboard, 2GB SuperTalent PC2-8000, Intel Xeon 3050 (C2D @ 2.13GHz), HIS X1600Pro, Seagate 320GB, 8MB buffer, 7200 RPM, SATA-II Drive, Windows Vista Home Premium

Testing

Time for the testing phase, all tests are run 3 times and results are then averaged (unless otherwise noted). VL’s testing suite includes the following:

SiSoft Sandra 2007 - Our standard synthetic benchmark suite, updated to version 2005. While it doesn't provide real-world information, it does give us a base for the rest of the tests.

PiFast - A good indicator of CPU/Motherboard performance is version 4.3, by Xavier Gourdon. We used a computation of 10000000 digits of Pi, Chudnovsky method, 1024 K FFT, and no disk memory. Note that lower scores are better, and times are in seconds.

DVD Shrink 3.2 - We ripped the War of the Worlds bonus feature off the disk at 100% and compressed the file from the hard drive to 70%. DVD Shrink is a common application used to backup your own DVD's from DVD-9 to DVD-5 size. This is a heavy test on the CPU / Memory / HD communication. Times are in minutes:seconds, and lower is better.

TMPGEnc 4.0 - We used the same clip from our DVD Shrink test, we however converted the VOB into a DVD compliant MPEG-2 file with a bitrate of 5000. Times are in minutes:seconds, and lower is better.

Quake 4 – How good is the CPU / Video / Memory communication? We strip down a demo of Q4 to 640x480 HQ and make the processor do a lot more work then it normally has to.

Subsytem Testing – We test the on-board sound performance using RightMark3D.