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- Date:
- Tuesday , April 11, 2006
- Author:
- Daniel Dobrowolski
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
MSI K8N Diamond Plus
While not the first board to hit the streets using the nForce 4 SLI X16 chipset, MSI brings out their own feature rich enthusiast board to compete for your hard earned cash. Just how does the K8N Diamond Plus fair against the competition?
BIOS
MSI used the Award BIOS for the K8N Diamond Plus. Version 308 Beta was used for this review to solve problems encountered while trying to overclock the Athlon FX-60 dual core CPU. While this article was being written, MSI officially released BIOS version 308.
The Standard CMOS Features menu option has the time and date settings, floppy disk drive settings and the usual hard drive settings and information. Under Storage Configuration is where you will find SATA and RAID configuration settings. As most of the newer systems use SATA primarily and not the older EIDE interface, many newer motherboards aren't supporting PATA RAID. The K8N Diamond Plus is no exception to this latest trend. At the bottom of this screen is a System Information menu and a CPU Configuration menu, the latter only having GART and MTRR mapping options.
The Advanced BIOS Features section has the usual Quick Boot, Full Screen Logo Display, Boot Sector Protection and MPS Table Version type stuff. Not too much of interest here. There is the Boot Sequence section for configuration your boot-able devices. All of this is pretty routine and very much standard. The next section of note is the Advanced Chipset Features menu. Here ECC settings can be found. Most of this will remain disabled as few will elect to use ECC modules with this type of motherboard.
Integrated peripherals are the next stop on our BIOS tour. Here you will find the USB controller and onboard device configuration settings. One irritation for me on this board's BIOS had to do with the fact that anytime you cleared the CMOS or even if you were just pulling the board out of the box and firing it up for the first time, everything was disabled by default. That means, audio, LAN, IEEE1394, and both network controllers were disabled unless you went into this section and enabled them. I thought that was less than intuitive and very annoying. The board would also disable those settings any time you loaded CMOS safe values or optimized values. Honestly I never saw a difference between the two other than what was in the Cell menu. I'll cover that section in more detail later. Rounding out the Integrated Peripherals Menu is I/O Devices Configuration, IDE Devices Configuration, SATA Devices Configuration, and most importantly, NVIDIA RAID setup. The last one being the most important as the above mentioned are pretty much standard on every motherboard made. The NVIDIA RAID setup is very simple, you just toggle the devices from disabled to enabled in order to choose which devices you'll allow the NVRAID BIOS to see as valid RAID devices.
Power Management would be the next menu item. Everything contained within is standard. PNP/PCI Configuration is underneath the Power Management section and is again standard and for the most part not anything you need to mess with. However, you will find the Primary Graphics Adapter option here and that is useful in case you want to use the bottom PCIe x16 slot for your primary video card. Or in most cases, for your only video card if you are not choosing to take advantage of SLI on this motherboard. You can also adjust and lock the IRQ setting of each PCIe x16 slot if need be. PC Health Status is the next section and it contains all the hardware monitoring information and threshold settings. There are three selectable options here and two of them are for fan configuration. The first item is Chassis Intrusion which only works if you have a case that supports this feature. This is disabled by default and probably should remain so for most people and OEM's alike. The next two items are much more noteworthy. The first and second are CPU Smart Fan and NB (for Northbridge) Smart Fan. These have three settings. The first is Disabled. The second is Thermal Cruise. I played with this and found it to be interesting. You just need to set your target temperature and the tolerance value and your done. The motherboard then figures out how to run the fan to reach your target temperature. The next option is Step Smart Fan. This does the same thing, but does so in a different fashion. You set the Fan Low and Fan High temperatures and then set the tolerance value and the system will adjust the fan speed to achieve the temperature threshold you've specified. The PC Heath Status screen also shows the systems voltages in real time as well as all monitored fan speeds via the 3 pin fan headers on the motherboard.
Lastly and definitely not least is the Cell Menu. Here is where the enthusiast will no doubt spend most of their time. This menu is very nicely laid out and very easy to understand. Everything is categorized and logical. There are three categories here though they aren't labeled as such; they are divided between CPU settings, Memory settings, and PCIe settings. Other manufacturers need to take notes here and make things easier for their customers. The first item is the CPU clock. This isn't a real time measurement, but rather what the board was set for when the system completed the POST sequence. The first adjustable setting is Cool 'n' Quiet. The next is Adjust CPU FSB Frequency, MHz. This setting is configurable from 200MHz to 450MHz. Which is well more than most will likely need as you'll likely find the board's limits long before reaching such values. The next item is the CPU Frequency Configuration. When you hit enter on this item it takes you to a sub menu. Here you can adjust the CPU Ratio/VID settings. There are two settings. Auto and Manual. Once manual is selected, the options for CPU Ratio adjustment and CPU VID appear. The motherboard supports CPU multipliers from 5-25. CPU VID options will be somewhat different based on the CPU installed. The 90nm Athlon 3800+ that I used had a max of 1.45v on this motherboard. When a 130nm CPU is used like the FX-53 for example, the allowable range is adjusted from 0.800v to 1.55v. This is very similar to other boards in this class. I would have liked to see adjustable voltage options into the 1.5 or even 1.6 range for all CPU's personally. Though excessive, many forum members and enthusiasts alike have wanted to see higher voltages selectable on many boards.
Back to the Cell Menu, the next settings to be configured are those for the memory. I had some irritations dealing with this section. Many times the motherboard would run the Corsair XPert 3200XL modules I was using at DDR333 speeds. Even with only two 512MB DIMM's installed! DRAM divider ratios are well labeled and easy to understand. They are clearly marked as DRAM/FSB=1/1 and so on. Another irritation for me was the fact that no matter what settings I chose, I was not able to adjust my memory voltages past 2.65v. That was a severe disappointment for me. At the bottom of this middle section of the Cell menu is the Memory Configuration submenu. When you hit enter on this menu you are taken into another sub-menu where your timings and memory hole settings can be found. MCT Timing Mode is the first option and once set to manual many items will appear. This is where the actual CAS latency adjustments can be found. There are quite a few to adjust CL (CAS Latency), TRC (Row Cycle Time), TRFC (Row Refresh Cycle Time), TRCD (RAS to CAS Delay), TRRD (Row to Row Delay), TRAS, (Min RAS Active Time), TRP (Row Pre-charge Time), TWR (Write Recovery Time), TWTR (Write to Read Delay), TRWT (Read to Write Delay), TREF (Refresh Rate), and TWCL (Write CAS Latency). Additionally, when the User Config mode is set to manual even more options appear. There are quite a few of these too. Memory DQ Drive Strength, Read/Write Queue Bypass Count, Bypass Max, Async Latency, Read Preamble, Idle Cycle Limit, Dynamic Idle Cycle Center, and CMD-ADDR Timing Mode. That last one is better known to enthusiasts as Command Timing Rate. This is the infamous 1T and 2T timing rate. Below those options are the standard Bank Interleaving, Burst Length and Hardware Memory hole. The latter only should be used for configurations that have 4GB of ram generally speaking.
Under the Cell Menu, we have the last section of that menu. This section has the PCI-Express Frequency adjustment and PCIe voltage settings, and more importantly, sub-menus for Hyper Transport, D.O.T. Control and Spread Spectrum settings. Hyper Transport is important, so lets start with that. When you press enter on the Hyper Transport Configuration option, you are taken to yet another sub-menu and given more options. The first is LDT (K8) to C51D (NB) Freq Auto. This basically tells the Hyper Transport link to adjust dynamically based on CPU settings. I'd recommend turning this off and controlling it manually. So disable that. Then we have LDT (K8) to C51D (NB) Frequency which is the actual Hyper Transport Frequency. Remember this is the actual HTT multiplier. 200 would be 1x, 400 would be 2x, and so on. Next is the LDT (K8) to C51D (NB) Link Width option. This has two settings 8 bit and 16 bit. The latter obviously sounds like the better choice for performance, though there isn't any hard data showing a performance difference with this type of setting. Underneath that is the C51D (NB) to NVIDIA (SB) Frequency and Link Width options. This is the HTT link between North and South Bridges. The general consensus is that this should match the K8 to NB settings. Also there is voltage adjustment for the C51D Northbridge itself. Though it is grayed out and not available for adjustment, but it is clearly an adjustment as various color coded help items appear on the left when it is selected. Unless this was intended more as a monitoring tool. finally, there is Hyper Transport NF4-SLI Configuration at the bottom of this sub-menu. This has the same options as the above C51D to NVIDIA SB setting.
Back under the Cell Menu option in the last section is the D.O.T. Control Function. This is MSI's own dynamic overclocking utility that is built into the motherboard BIOS. There are three options here. CPU Dynamic Overclocking, NV4x Core Clock Overclocking and NV4x Memory Clock Overclocking. Each option has values for overclocking from 1% to 15%. They are listed with a kind of military theme. Private, 1%, Sergeant, 3%, Captain, 5%, Colonel, 7%, General, 10%, and Commander, 15%. I am not sure as to why this is hear as there is nothing else about the board name, model or colors that goes along with this type of theme.
The last item back under the Cell Menu is the Spread Spectrum Configuration settings. There are settings for CPU, PCIe, SATA, and HT Spread Spectrum's.