As with most modern motherboards, once the PC fires up, press the DEL key and you'll be in. The MSI X58 Eclipse uses the familiar American Megatrends BIOS as a base, tweaked with their customizations. Each key page is fairly obvious, but let's break it down.

The Standard CMOS Features is where you go for basic system configuration. There isn't much to do with performance here, and the user is limited to modifying items such as date and time as well as showing what storage devices are attached to the system.

The Advanced BIOS Features has more in terms of system functionality, but again, little to do with performance. Here, you can customize the boot order of the devices and boot features. From a performance point of view, you can modify some CPU features such as Hyper-Threading, as well as Execute Bit Support, though the latter has to do with security. Additional security can be enabled by turning on BIOS Flash Protection. Keep in mind this should be turned off if you need to do a BIOS update.

In Integrated Peripherals, you can turn on and off the onboard devices built into the board. For the most part, I would imagine most people will leave most of the items enabled, but if you have absolutely no need for Firewire, you can turn that off. If you have no need for the JMicron controller, you can also turn that of though you need to realize if you still use an older PATA optical drive or hard drive, you need to leave this enabled. 

Power Management Setup is where you'd configure any special requirements you may have about waking on specific events or secial standby needs. For a desktop PC, this is not such an important feature, but for HTPC usage or any 24/7 environment, this would get a bit more attention.

Green Power is where you would go to configure your power saving options. You can manage the power of the CPU, QPI, IOH chipset, DDR and the LEDs. You can also review the power efficiency of the system from here as well.

The Cell Menu is where we really get into what enthusiasts are after. There are an abundance of options here, many of which directly impact PC performance as well as stability. The page is setup in loosely defined areas. The first area is all about the CPU. It is here you make the modification in order to overclock the processor. Sadly for some I would imagine, the days of simply keying in a number for the front side bus are long gone as the X58 is a bit more complicated that than now. We'll cover this more shortly. the Memory section allows the user to make adjustments from clock speeds to timings. the ClockGen Tuner is correlated to the PCI frequency. Finally, the voltage area adds or reduces power based on the needs.

The User Settings page allows the user to make changes to the BIOS and save them. this saves time in case you made temporary changes and forgot what they were, or if you needed to recover from a bad change or overclock.

The M-Flash is an interesting tool which you can use a USB device to flash your system rather than the old fashioned way of booting with a floppy or boot CD and running an update script.