BIOS

MSI's BIOS of choice is AMI Megatends' AMI BIOS interface which has been used by them for quite some time. AMI BIOS has managed to really pull out all the stops in recent times to create a BIOS interface that is easy to use as well as giving a familiar feel; after all, Award has been around for ages and is the most used BIOS out there. For the overclocking features you need to go to the Cell Menu section.

Buses

Adjust CPU FSB Frequency: 200 - 800 in 1MHz Increments

Adjust PCIE Frequency: 100 - 200 in 1MHz Increments

Adjust PCI Frequcney: 33.3MHz, 33.6MHz, 37.2MHz, 42MHz

Voltages

CPU Voltage: 1.3250v to 2.1v in 0.0125v increments

Memory Voltage: 1.5v to 2.75v in 0.05v Increments

FSB Termination Voltage: 1.2v to 1.44v in various increments

NB Voltage: 1.25v to 1.83v in various increments

SB Voltage: 1.5v to 1.83v in various increments

Overclocking

Well, all we could say was "Wow!" when it came to overclocking this board. So far we have only tested the X48 DDR2 variant, and with the extra headroom that DDR3 offers we hoped to get a better bus speed. Here we managed to get 558MHz out of the board, and while it still hasn't matched the 580MHz we have hit with the P35 and DDR3, it's a great start for X48 and DDR3. Even X38 and DDR3 hasn't managed to get this far. Intel's hand picking seems to be helping here.

Important Editor Note:Our maximum overclocking result is the best result we managed in our limited time of testing the motherboard. Due to time constraints we weren't able to tweak the motherboard to the absolute maximum and find the highest possible FSB, as this could take days to find properly. 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. "Burn-in" time might also come into play if you believe in that.