X-bit labs

DDR2 or DDR3: MSI P35 Platinum Combo Mainboard Review (page 12)

Category: Mainboards

by Doors4ever

[ 02/29/2008 | 04:37 PM ]

Dual CoreCenter Sidebar

You may know that there is a sidebar in Widows Vista where you can use a lot of Microsoft programs and third-party utilities. MSI Dual CoreCenter sidebar is one of them. The window looks very modest:

However, once you start working with it you will see all the features it has to offer, which you may never suspect at first glance. For example, if you roll the mouse pointer over the program window, you will get additional buttons:

M stands for Motherboard and the current CPU and mainboard parameters. V stands for VGA and reports the VGA settings.

The button on the very right opens a new window where you can select D.O.T. technology or one of the five preset profiles:

Setting button allows choosing one of the user defined profiles (A, B or C) and adjust it as desired or return to the default one.

In fact, you don’t even need to click on the D.O.T. tab or any others: all you need to do is just hold the pointer over the selected tab for a while.

The idea behind the Display tab was a little unclear at first.

Then we found out that it allowed choosing three parameters to be displayed in the main program window. There are three icons at the very bottom: CPU, FSB and Clock. And as you remember, by default we see CPU temperature, FSB frequency and resulting CPU speed. Drag and drop the Clock icon and replace it with Fan CPU and the main window will be reporting a little different thing now:

By the way, the graph stands for the first parameter in the list, which is CPU temperature in this case.

The last tab in the list allows converting ºC to ºF and disable the voice hints. Yes, the name of every menu item you roll your pointer over will be read to you with a pleasant though pretty mechanical female voice.