The BIOS Continued

During the initial launch of the nForce 500 series, one of the main features of the 590 SLI was that it would have an "enthusiast BIOS". This would certainly be the case for any companies who used straight reference designs, but luckily MSI opted to do some modifications for performance minded folks. Their Cell Menu page is the central hub for the important system tweaks that are key in setting up a finely tuned box.

By default, AMD's Cool 'n' Quiet is disabled, which is where we suggest you leave it if the K9N SLI Platinum is to be a workhorse PC or gaming rig. This feature lowers the power consumption and enables a quieter-running system when the CPU is less busy. The performance-on-demand feature of the technology basically allows the CPU to wake up into a more active state as the need arises. According to MSI, if you choose to use Cool 'n' Quiet, you must have memory occupying DIMM 1 for stability reasons.

The CPU Frequency default is 200.0 and has increment options of 0.5MHz all the way up to 425MHz. If you're uncomfortable, or impatient, you can forego the manual process and choose the CPU Dynamic Overclocking option. This is disabled by default, but you have six options ranging from 1% to 15%. This mode only kicks in when the CPU is under load. While it's idle, the CPU will run at its default speed but once you start any CPU intensive application, the motherboard will dynamically overclock based on the settings chosen.

The CPU Frequency Configuration (not to be confused with CPU Frequency) allows the user to enter a sub-menu and make adjustments to the CPU's ratio and voltage. The majority of CPUs are locked, except for FX chips, so this section may not be terribly useful if you're an owner of one of a non-FX AM2. That said, the options are there for the user to change.

The next section of the Cell Menu focusses on the memory. In order to make any user tweaks to the memory, you will need to set the Memclock Mode to Manual.

You'll be able to make adjustments to the memory's frequency, which is especially handy if you have memory modules that are tolerant to overclocking. In the Memory Configuration page, you can make further adjustments to the memory's latencies (provided this is set to Manual).

No doubt many of you have encountered situations where a CMOS reset is required to allow for a system to reboot. MSI makes the task easy with a push button on the motherboard right next to the CMOS battery. Very handy indeed, and much easier than fumbling with jumpers.

Test Setup

Operating System: Windows XP Professional (5.1, Build 2600) Service Pack 2 (2600.xpsp_sp2_rtm.040803-2158)
Processor: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4400+, MMX, 3DNow (2 CPUs), ~2.2GHz
Memory: 2048MB RAM
DirectX Version: DirectX 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)
Card name: NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GT
Driver Version: 6.14.0010.9131

Comparison Motherboards: ASUS P5N32-SLI Deluxe, ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe

CPUs: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ Dual Core AM2 Processor, AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ Dual Core S939 Processor, Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 840

Going up against the MSI K9N SLI Platinum Motherboard will be two nForce 4 based motherboards in the form of the ASUS P5N32-SLI Deluxe and ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe. The setups all share similar peripheral components, though there will be an Intel CPU for the P5N32 naturally. Furthermore, the DDR2 platforms will be using Corsair's latest low latency XMS2-6400 while the A8N32 will be using XMS-3500.

Test Software is as follows:

SYSMark 2004 Office and Content Creation - A scripted benchmark using real-world applications. Higher numbers are better.

PiFast - A good indicator of CPU/Motherboard performance is PiFast version 4.2, 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.

CDex Audio Conversion Wav to MP3 - CDex was used to convert a 414MB Wav file to a 320kbs MP3. Times are in minutes:seconds, and lower is better.

DVD Shrink - We ripped the War of the Worlds bonus feature off the disk at 100% and compressed the file from the hard drive to 70%. Times are in minutes:seconds, and lower is better.

Doom 3, Far Cry, Unreal Tournament 2004 @ 640x480, HQ Settings - While higher resolutions tax the video card, lower resolutions rely on CPU and subsystem speed. Higher scores are better.

All benchmarks will be run a total of three times with the average scores being displayed. Any system tweaks and ram timings were configured to the best possible for each platform.

SYSMark 2004 Office and Content Creation

The Intel platform seems to have a pretty clear advantage in Office benchmarks, but in multimedia and web design, the Athlon processors are big winners here. The K9N SLI Platinum has a bigger lead thanks to the higher frequency ram.

PiFast

This benchmark is taken by the K9N SLI, besting the Intel nForce board by over 3 seconds.

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