BIOS

MSI has used the AMI Megatrends BIOS system which they have been a fan of for quite some time now. Layout is almost identical to that of the Award BIOS, so if you are going from a board with Award to the AMI setup, it's not difficult to find the settings you are looking for.

Adding some bling to their setup, at the top of the screen the AMI logo banner changes colour from black to blue in a scrolling fashion.

MSI has placed all of its overclocking features for you under the Cell menu and it is here where all your dreams come true for overclocking.

Frequencies

FSB: 200MHz to 500MHz in 1MHz Increments

PCI Express: 100MHz to 133MHz in 1MHz Increments

Voltages

CPU Voltage: +0.0125v to +0.7875v in 0.0125v Increments

DRAM Voltage: 1.85v to 2.45v in 0.05v Increments

NB Voltage: 1.21v to 1.69v in Various Increments

Overclocking

Despite the lack of voltage setting here we did manage to get quite an impressive overclocking result out of MSI's P965 Platinum. We updated to the latest 1.2v BIOS which was released in November last year and managed to get a very solid 484MHz FSB out of it.

While it cannot match the 497MHz FSB we now are able to get out of the Gigabyte DQ6 motherboard, it's still impressive and we are pleased with the results from the MSI board.

We had to use 2.4 volts on memory, 1.56 volts on Northbridge and left the CPU at stock standard as we lowered the multiplier to 6x as it was actually operating at a slower clock speed than its default. In all we are very impressed with this board compared to the P965 Neo we were sent a few months ago.

Important Editor Note: Our maximum overclocking result is the best result we managed in our limited time testing the motherboard. Due to time constraints we don't have enough time to tweak the motherboard to the maximum and find the highest possible FSB as this could take days to properly find. We do however spend at least a few hours overclocking every motherboard to try and find the highest possible overclock in that time frame. You may or may not be able to overclock higher if you spend more time tweaking or as new BIOS updates are released or "burn in" time might come into play if you believe in that.