BIOS Setup

The BIOS of MSI Eclipse Plus mainboard is based on AMI microcode and has a number of peculiarities that we haven’t come across before. That is why we are going to talk about it in a bit greater detail.

The first section in the menu is “Standard CMOS Features”:

It is very pleasing to see an unusually long list of Serial ATA devices, but the screenshot is primarily intended to draw your attention to the date: April 21, 2009. You will understand later one when we get to “System Information” subsection.

You can learn more details about the system CPU in other sections as well. Here we are mostly interested in the BIOS version – V1.0 from 04.21.09. Do you recognize the date? Unfortunately, MSI Eclipse Plus mainboard is still suffering from an issue, which has become pretty common lately. When you clear CMOS, which was exactly what we did before taking the screenshots, the system resets the date and time setting the date of the BIOS as current. It is pretty inconvenient and causes some additional problems during initial system configuring and search for optimal overclocking settings.

The next section in the list is “Advanced BIOS Features”.

A little later we will see that almost all parameters crucial for successful system optimization and overclocking are gathered in “Cell Menu” section, however, for some reason they have forgotten about “CPU Feature” subsection.

In the meanwhile, only in this subsection you can disable Hyper-Threading and C1E power-saving technology. There is also a strange parameter called “Overspeed Protection”. Judging by the description, it monitors the CPU power consumption and if it exceeds a certain level, the frequency will be lowered. They recommend disabling this function during overclocking, however, during our experiments we didn’t notice any difference, unfortunately. We will talk more about it in our chapter devoted to overclocking.

We are going to skip the sections called “Integrated Peripherals” and “Power Management Setup”, as there is nothing new there. Our next stop will be in “H/W Monitor” section:

The rotation speed of the CPU cooler fan will be adjusted automatically, we just need to set the maximum temperature in the interval from 40 to 70°C with 5°C increment. Too bad that only four-pin fans are supported, just like on most other contemporary mainboards. Moreover, you can set the rotation speed of three other fans at 50, 75 or 100% from the maximum and it will be maintained constantly. Here we can also find out the current rotation speed of these four fans, which is a good thing. The bad thing is that the rotation speed of the remaining two fans cannot be monitored or adjusted in any way. MSI Eclipse Plus mainboard also can’t boast anything special in terms of monitoring temperatures and voltages. We only know processor Vcore, and in order to monitor all other voltages that can be adjusted on this board, we will have to use special utilities.

“Green Power” section allows enabling MSI’s brand name power-saving technologies, turn off LEDs, control the current, power consumption and energy efficiency.