BIOS and Overclocking

MSI has chosen the AWARD BIOS version 6 for their motherboard. In fact, the layout is identical to that of the MSI 915GM Speedster board which we looked at previously. For those who know the menu system that ASUS uses in their BIOS's, you will be familiar with the 945GT Speedster's BIOS.

To find the overclocking options you need to move to the advanced tab and under there you are given the CPU FSB option. You can go from 133MHz up to 400MHz in 1MHz increments. 133MHz FSB is used when running Celeron-M processors and 166MHz is used when Core Duo and Core Solo processors are installed. While 400MHz would be nice, since there are no CPU or memory voltage options, you are not going to get that far, at least with the latest version of BIOS we used from MSI - version 1.0.

To get access to DRAM timings you need to navigate to the Advanced Chipset Features sub menu under the advanced tab. Here you can manually set your DRAM speed and timings if the SPD settings are not good enough for you.

We managed to get our Core Duo T2500 (default clock speed - 166MHz FSB x 12 = 2GHz) processor up to a maximum of 2.2GHz which resulted in a FSB of 183MHz FSB using a 12x multiplier. Not too bad for a motherboard which isn't designed to be an overclocking power house.