The BIOS

The AMIBIOS makes another appearance on the MSI platform. All the usual suspects are present, such as Standard CMOS and Power Management features, but MSI did make several changes in favour of the enthusiast.

Once you're done setting up basic items, such as Boot Order, and system time, tweakers will want to tackle the Advanced Chipset Features. Here, you can make adjustments in order to squeeze more performance, or to retain stability, or, of course, a combination of the two. Lightning Data Transport (LDT), is VIA's implementation of HyperTransport, and controls the data moving to, or from the CPU to chipset.

The memory options are something of a mixed bag. Maximum DDR support is DDR400, syncronous. You can run async, but downwards only. We would have liked to have seen options like 4/5, 5/6, and so forth, but unfortunently, you're capped at 1:1 as the most aggressive setting. On the otherhand, there are plenty of options available when it comes to adjusting the memory timings.

Under Frequency/Voltage Control, this is where you can play with the overclocking. The FSB range is 190 to 280, but realistically, 280FSB will almost certainly be out of reach. You can also use the Dynamic Overclocking option, which can give you a boost from 1 to 10%. This is a feature of the CoreCell discussed earlier, and you can adjust the FSB and Dynamic Overclocking independent, or in conjunction of one another.

Missing from the K8T Neo is any form a AGP/PCI lock. This will almost certainly be the determining factor when you start getting stuck at certain FSB settings while overclocking.

With MSI's BIOS, you can have control over the voltages of the CPU, AGP and memory, but there isn't a whole lot to be excited about. The default voltage of the Athlon 64 is 1.5v, and the K8T Neo allows a maximum of 15% over the stock voltage. This works out to 1.725v, which when you consider the maximum allowable FSB, isn't really all that impressive.

Another disappointment came from the rather conservative memory voltage options, which is a maximum of 2.85v. Many performance DDR modules typically require more voltage to maintain stability, but on the otherhand, considering you're stuck at DDR400, and likely an OC of less than 230FSB, I suppose this situation isn't as dire as I initially made it sound.

AGP voltage tops out at 1.85v, which isn't bad, and considering any OCing will increase your AGP bus speed, you'll be able to add more juice to maintain stability.

Overclocking

There will be a few obstacles when trying to overclock the current crop of Athlon 64 CPUs. Our A64 3200+ was multiplier locked, and chances are, yours will be to. The most recent MSI K8T BIOS does not allow for multiplier unlocking, so you'll be limited to increasing the FSB. With the 10x multiplier of the 3200+, you would think there is headroom, but the MSI K8T, as mentioned earlier, does not have an AGP or PCI lock. Any FSB overclocking you do will affect those buses.

Knowing that, we began our overclocking adventure. Using some Kingston HyperX Pc4000, and setting our ram timings to 2-3-3-5 at 200FSB, the system would not boot. An increase in DDR voltage resolved that, but the system was still not stable. Clocking down to 2.5-3-3-6 brought stability back, though I'm still at a loss why we had so many problems considering our P4 boards handled those problems without issues.

200FSB

At 2.5-3-3-6 memory times, the maximum OC the motherboard handled was 219FSB, but we experienced random lockups and crashes. This was also after increasing voltage to 1.725v. Lowering down to 212FSB resolved those issues. We then relaxed the timings to 3-4-4-7, and managed an overclock of 226FSB, but again, the system was unreliable. In fact, a reinstall of the OS was required, as various system files became corrupted.

217FSB

In order to maintain stability, we settled for an OC of 217FSB, with memory timings of 3-4-4-7. At 1.725v, the system still randomly crashed at anything higher. I did improve things somewhat by playing with the memory and AGP voltages, but there was still some odd behaviour (lockups mostly) at 218FSB. At 217FSB, I was able to tweak the memory at 2.5-3-3-6, but was not able to run in Turbo mode. Fast mode worked fine.

Core Center

MSI's Core Center is the software interface with their CoreCell technology. It's actually a very handy utility, and displays some useful system information, such as speed and temperature. It's a memory resident application, that sits in your taskbar, but you can lauch and close it at will if you wish. According to Windows Task Manager, it eats about 5MB of memory, which isn't too much.

You're also able to overclock your system via the Core Center. By pressing "Auto", your FSB will slowly move up, but I should warn you that it goes until your system locks up unless you stop it. I found this feature to be shakey at best, since in the past, a bad OC will force a reboot, and in most cases all was well. With the Core Center, I actually lost a bunch of USB system files after the OC lockup. Use with care, and personally, I still prefer tweaking through the BIOS.

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