The BIOS

You're going to have to excuse the blatent cut and paste from our previous KT3 review, but the BIOS remains unchanged with the Ultra2.

MSI makes use of the, now familiar, AMIBios. In the past, the AMIBios wasn't very tweaker friendly, but it's pretty good now, and anyone used to the AwardBios will feel right at home.

Standard features are present, and you of course have access to ALL the onboard features on the BIOS. Don't use RAID? Great, just disable it. This option was missing from our Asus board, and we're happy to see it here, since the Promise controller does add a significant amount of time to the POST process.

Probably what's most important for anyone who'd purchase a KT333 based board is the memory control. You can choose to run your ram asyncronous with your FSB, or if your ram can handle it, HCLK+33.

No overclocking board (yes, MSI does market this as one in the manual, but of course there are no guarantees) would be complete without the ability to make FSB and multiplier changes in the BIOS. Simply tab the FSB clock, and manually enter any value in (increments of 1 are available), and you're off to the races.

Overclocking

Overclocking was a mixed bag for us with our last KT3, but more people have had success with the CE revision. How did we fare this time around? We worked in increments of 10, and here are our results...

12.5 x 140 = Pass
12.5 x 150 = Fail

Ok, so it looks like the multiplier may be adding too much strain to the system. Since we unlocked our XP 2000+ a while ago, we dropped the multiplier back to 10. We would have left it higher, but I wanted to just get a post...

10 x 140 = Pass
10 x 150 = Fail

This was getting interesting. I was fairly certain that 150FSB would be attainable, so we dropped down the multiplier to 9, which was the absolute lowest I would go without comprimising the performance too much...

9 x 140 = Pass
9 x 150 = Pass
9 x 155 = Fail
9 x 154 = Pass

Previously, the KT3 wasn't able to hit 150FSB, but now we got as high as 154. I did manage to get up to 165FSB, but that meant lowering the multiplier down to 7. Honestly, I'm not convinced the lower multiplier trade-off is worth it, but that's up to you to decide.

Update: Well, the focus of this article was the motherboard in general, and not overclocking. Since this is a popular topic for most of you, we gave it another shot, with the sole purpose of reaching the highest possible FSB we could. In order to do so, we jacked the vCore to 1.85v, and slapped on our Swiftech MCX462, with an 80mm Delta fan. We lowered our ram speed to run asycronous witht he FSB (HCLK), and set the timings to as conservative as possible. I removed the RAID array, and placed a single drive on the standard IDE, and disabled all non-essential hardware.

The end result was a 6x190 overclock. Not too shabby. It wasn't totally stable though, as I'm fairly certain the ram is holding us back. I'm pretty sure those of you with quality PC3000 ram, such as Corsair XMS, will hit 190 easy, and 200FSB isn't totally out of the question.

Test Setup

AMD Athlon XP 2000+
MSI KT3 Ultra2-R
512MB PC2700 Crucial DDR
2 x 60GB 7200rpm Maxtor Harddrives, Promise RAID
Visiontek Xtasy GeForce 4 Ti4600

AMD Athlon XP 2000+
MSI KT3 Ultra-ARU
512MB PC2700 Crucial DDR
2 x 60GB 7200rpm Maxtor Harddrives, Promise RAID
Visiontek Xtasy GeForce 4 Ti4600

Windows XP Professional
Via 4-in-1 v4.38
nVidia Detonator 28.32

SiSoft Sandra
PC Mark 2002
Quake 3: Arena
3D Mark 2001SE

Rather than bogging you down with a dozen benchmarks at different speeds and resolutions, we're going to keep things simple. When applicable, only 640x480 scores will be displayed, as that resolution will eliminate the video card as the bottleneck for game benchmarks.

For our memory benchmarks, all setting were configured for maximum performance. We did have to back down to CAS2.5 for 166FSB (HCLK+33) for our tests to complete successfully.

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