BIOS and Overclocking

MSI KT4A Ultra uses BIOS from AMI. However, there are not too many differences in settings of this BIOS and the competing BIOS from AWARD. The same colors, font and even items names. The main BIOS window looks like this:

Please, pay attention to the item dealing with the voltage and frequency settings. It is a definite misprint. It is interesting that the same misprint is also on the screenshot in the user’s manual (though it is absent in the text). I wonder how come that no one noticed it!. Anyway, this is not the only typo in the BIOS. A very similar mistake can be found in the Advanced BIOS Features, where we see “Boot Sequency” instead of “Boot Sequence”.

All in all, it seemed to me that they were really in a rush with this BIOS, so that no one even bothered to read the text. Unfortunately, this rush told not only on the text, which we will show you later. Now let’s take a closer look at the notorious “Boot Sequency” item, because it is the first interesting thing we come across in the BIOS of our board:

We can select three boot-up devices and define whether the system should be searched for on “other devices”. By default the first device is left empty. In fact, among the “devices” can also be USB flash drives, for instance. Here I would like to say that I managed to boot from a flash-drive successfully, although I had to enable in advance the USB Legacy Support, which is located in a totally different menu page, namely in Integrated Peripherals. Of course, the manual didn’t say a word about it. Also, note that the 1st Boot Device may be set directly during the POST procedure by pressing F11 key.

Now I would like to dwell on the item, which will be of interest to fine tuning and overclocking fans. It is Advanced Chipset Features Setup, to be more exact – DRAM Timing Control page. AGP Timing Control is hardly of any interest to many users, especially, since the parameters available there are not very familiar to the majority of users. This is what the DRAM Timing Control page looks like:

Besides a great number of timing settings on this page, you can also adjust the memory frequency. And here we have every reason to take a few big pokes at MSI. The first poke: at any bus frequency, the list of available memory frequencies includes not only those ones, which are actually supported but all the other ones, too. This way, we strongly recommend to refrain from changing the memory frequency without the table of correspondences from the user’s manual. If you set the wrong frequency, the mainboard will not boot and the diagnostic LEDs will indicate failed memory detection. The second poke: the memory frequencies are always shown as 266MHz, 333MHz or 400MHz, even if the bus frequency is 140MHz, for example, which you can see on the screenshot. Moreover, they are displayed like that not only in the BIOS, but also during POST. Well, this is the asynchrony from MSI.