BIOS

MSI's P6N SLI Platinum uses the AMI Megatrends base for its BIOS setup. MSI has a history of using the AMI BIOS for its boards which have really grown up in terms of maturity, AMI in the past has been the BIOS to avoid, but over the last two years it has improved quite a bit. MSI puts all of its clocking options under the Cell Menu, which is where it normally resides on the company's Core Cell boards.

Frequencies

FSB Clock: 400MHz to 2500MHz in 1MHz increments

Memory Clock: 400MHz to 1400MHz in 1MHz increments

PCIe: 100MHz to 131MHz in 1MHz increments

Voltages

CPU Voltage: +0.0125v to +0.2875v in 0.0125v increments

Memory Voltage: 1.8v to 2.8v in 0.05v increments

NB Core: 1.25v to 1.5v in 0.025v increments

SB Core: 1.54v to 1.58v in 0.03v increments

SB Dual: 1.5v to 1.7v in 0.05v increments

CPU VTT Ref Voltage: 2% to 20% in various increments

Overclocking

While we only managed 466MHz FSB on our ECS board, we went slightly higher on our MSI board.

Using BIOS revision 1.1 we managed to hit 472MHz FSB with memory at 2.4v, CPU at +0.1000V, NB and SB voltages at max and CPU VTT Reg at 20%. It is clear the 650i chipset is not intended to clock to the max.

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.