BIOS
MSI have come on leaps and bounds in the BIOS area in comparison with around 3 years ago, and the BIOS and it's layout used for this board is a good one. A very minor point, but for those who like eye-candy; the top bar cycles a blue to black background. Yeah, very minor point, but I thought I'd point it out because ... ooh look over there! Shiny!
Everything is laid out logically within a page in the BIOS GUI; The first page offers information and adjustments on the time and date, disk drive information and detection, etc. The second page takes us into more advanced settings to setup the various features and peripherals of the board. The third page offers basic memory settings.
Page four contains settings for the integrated peripherals, including RAID setup. Page five is laid out for setting your power management features and page six will offer you PNP/PCI configurations. Page seven has a lot of information on the health status of the various components in your system, such as CPU/NB temperatures, fan speeds (and settings) as well as voltage monitoring.
The final big page (page 8) is where the enthusiast magic happens; the Cell Menu. Split into three sections, the Cell Menu will let you set the CPU frequency and voltages, and MSI have helpfully put AMD's Cool'n'Quiet option in here. CPU frequencies are selected from a comprehensive list that goes up all the way to 450.
The second section deals with DDR settings; Frequency and Voltage options are available as well as extended tweaking of the CAS, Command Rate, etc that are common tweaking options as well as a plethora of other memory configuration options that are more obscure. MSI have sometimes been criticized in the past in offering memory voltages that are quite conservative, but enthusiast's should be happy with this board; MSI offer up to 3.2v via the BIOS and by physically adjusting a set of jumpers on the board, you can increase this all the way up to (3.3v to) 4.1v.
The third section is set for adjusting other items that can effect your ability to overclock; setting the PCIe frequency or the Hypertransport speeds for example. MSI go into quite a bit of detail on most of these options in their manual, but there are a few options that are basically just listed in the manual rather than explained in detail. Also, MSI have listed the HyperTransport speeds as a MHz rating rather than a multiplier as found in other motherboards, although it is a simple thing to work out the settings (1000MHz is x5, 800MHz is x4 etc).
Overall the BIOS might take a little time to get used to (and to work out all of the settings) but when you do, you'll find it to be very conveniently laid out and very nice to work with. I would have liked to have seen some ability to save multiple BIOS configurations though.
Testing
Test Setup – Athlon X2 3800+, MSI K8N Diamond Plus, 1GB Corsair XML3200 Pro, Maxtor 80GB SATA HDD, ATI X1800XL
For Comparison we are using the Foxconn WinFast 6150K8MA-8EKRS motherboard.
Test software will be -
SiSoft Sandra 2005 Memory - Our standard synthetic memory benchmark. While it doesn't provide real-world information, it does give us an idea of memory performance.
SYSMark 2004 Office and Content Creation - A scripted benchmark using real-world applications. Like the SiSoft tests, higher numbers are better.
PiFast - A good indicator of CPU/Motherboard performance is 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.
TMPGEnc 2.521 - We used an Animatrix file, titled , and a WAV created from VirtualDub. The movie was then converted it into a DVD compliant MPEG-2 file with a bitrate of 5000. Times are in minutes:seconds, and lower is better.
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.
Quake 4 - iD's latest shooter can be very demanding on your CPU and subsystem. A demo of multiplay was used, with a timedemo run at 640x480.
3dMark06 - Very synthetic, but running at 640x480 can gave us an idea of how well things run from one board to the next, everything else being equal. HQ settings were used with every supported test selected. Higher scores are better.
SiSoft Sandra 2005 Memory
Only minimal differences between the two boards here (look at the numbers, not the bars), which is a common thing to see with AMD systems since the memory controller is onboard the CPU.
SYSMark 2004 Office and Content Creation
The MSI board begins our testing phase by edging out in the scores in both content creation and office productivity. The scores are very close, and both boards are within a few points of each other, but the MSI K8N Diamond Plus does things just a little better.
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