BIOS

It has already become a tradition for MSI to use AMI BIOS for their solutions, and it distinguishes MSI P6N SLI Platinum significantly from the solutions on the same chipset. The BIOS Setup of this mainboard doesn’t look very common and features a number of peculiarities. I had to deal with the first of these peculiarities right when I installed the mainboard into the testbed. BIOS version 1.01 that was reflashed in the sample we received turned out unable to support all USB keyboards that we had in our lab. This meant that we couldn’t access Setup and adjust the CPU and other parameters for testing.

Luckily, the BIOS version 1.1 that is currently available on the MSI website helped us resolve this issue. With this BIOS version reflashed all USB keyboards work flawlessly almost all the time. However, this BIOS version also didn’t last long on the board. The difficulties we faced during our overclocking experiments forced us to continue the search for more up-to-date BIOS versions. As a result, we tested this mainboard with an even newer BIOS version 1.21 recommended by MSI engineers on their own forums. So, everything we are going to say about BIOS later in this article refers to this particular BIOS version.

All most interesting BIOS Setup options are gathered together in a separate Menu page called Cell Menu, which serves as a certain control center for the processor and memory settings. of course, this section is going to be of primary interest to overclockers.

Having reported the actual working frequencies of the processor and system memory, this BIOS Setup page immediately offers you to use D.O.T. dynamic overclocking technology. It allows to automatically overclock the CPU if the workload increases. The processor frequency in this case may rise from 1% to 10% above the nominal. Of course, this range is hardly attractive enough for overclocking fans, so in the long run D.O.T. will not be used that frequently.

Luckily MSI P6N SLI Platinum also offers pretty full list of traditional overclocking-friendly functions. For example the front side bus frequency may be changed from 100 to 750MHz. just like on other mainboards based on Nvidia chipsets, the FSB frequency can be set in a not very convenient quad pumped format.

The memory frequency is set up either synchronously with the FSB or pseudo-asynchronously in the range between 400 and 1400MHz. As you already know from our previous articles, Nvidia nForce 650i SLI doesn’t have a truly asynchronous clock generator to clock the memory bus. When you select the desired value in BIOS Setup, the mainboard will pick the most appropriate divider (the chipset offers more than enough of them). Therefore the actual memory frequency will be slightly different from what you set in the BIOS Setup. In most cases this frequency will be slightly lower than the desired value, but no less than 10-20MHz lower.

The PCI Express bus frequency may be set between 100 and 200MHz.