![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Monday , September 11, 2006
- Author:
- Daniel Dobrowolski
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
MSI K9A Platinum
MSI brings to market a new ATI Radeon Xpress 3200 motherboard with Crossfire support. This board contains ATI’s new SB600 south bridge. We find out what the inclusion of this south bridge, with the already proven Radeon Xpress 3200 can do.
BIOS
MSI used the Phoenix Award BIOS with the K9A Platinum. Version 1.20 was used for testing.
The AwardBIOS CMOS utility hasn’t really ever changed much since it was introduced in the late 1990’s. Though the options under the advanced sections differ from board to board the utility navigates the same on almost every board. The main screen looks exactly as you would expect it to if you are familiar with Award/Phoenix BIOSes. Under the Standard CMOS Features menu is the basic date, time and drive configuration settings commonplace to nearly every motherboard. As usual this is all boring stuff and most of it you can leave alone aside from the time and date settings of course.
The Advanced BIOS Features screen is somewhat of a misnomer. The fact is there is nothing terribly advanced going on here. This is where you can turn off the full screen logo option during the POST sequence. (Which by the way is a very cool looking space ship.) Additionally you’ll find the MPS Table Version setting, IOAPIC setting, Boot Up Num Lock LED and so on. This is all very standard stuff.
The Advanced Chipset Features section contains some basic memory settings. Mostly it contains CAS and RAS settings. Oddly, the bulk of the settings you would normally see here are moved into the Core Cell menu which we will cover later, but these four settings were left here.
Integrated Peripherals is the next area. Here you will find USB Controller settings, Legacy USB settings, Onboard LAN Controller settings such as the LAN Option ROM support, IEEE1394 support and you can also turn off the onboard audio controller here as well. The On-Chip ATA devices section controls RAID settings and basic AHCI SATA settings as well. I.O Devices has your standard RS232 settings as well as your normal LPT Port settings, Floppy controller settings and so on.
Power Management has the usual ACPI Function, ACPI Standby State, Suspend Time, Power Button Function, and Restore from AC Power Loss and Wake Up Event settings.
Under PNP/PCI you will find the latency timer and that is it. Usually you would find IRQ configuration settings like IRQ reserve. For some reason there is almost nothing here.
The next section is the H/W Monitor section or Hardware Monitoring section. The Chassis intrusion setting is here as is the CPU Fan Pin Select setting. This is used to switch between 4 and 3 pin fans. Smart Fan Target is another setting found here, and PC Health Status shows the current status of the boards’ CPU and motherboard voltage as well as current temperature of the CPU and motherboard monitoring zone. Various fan headers can be monitored here to ensure that the installed fans are operating correctly.
The Cell Menu is where things get interesting. All the CPU, memory, voltage, and PCI-Express settings are located here. You can also control Hyper Transport settings, and Cool ‘n’ Quiet mode from here. The systems FSB can be adjusted from 200MHz to 400MHz in 1MHz increments as is standard practice on most motherboards these days. The CPU ratio is adjustable from the CPU’s max all the way own to x5.
CPU voltages range from 1.200v to 1.350v using the Athlon64 X2 4200+ CPU. By default this setting is set for Auto. HT Link Speed has two settings. Those are Standard and For Overclocking. The standard setting leaves you with an HT speed of 1000MHz, but the For Overclocking setting is an automatic one. You can not adjust the FSB manually using the 1.20 BIOS we used here.
Next is Adjust DDR Memory Frequency. There are settings for DDR 2 400, 533, 667, and 800 speeds. Memory voltage is next, followed by Advance DRAM Configuration. Once Advance DRAM Configuration is selected, you are taken to a sub menu where ROW Cylce Time (TRC), ROW Refresh Cylce Time (Trfc), ROW to ROW Delay, (Trrd), Write Recovery Time (Twr), Write to Read Delay (Twtr), Read to Write Delay (Trwt), 1T/2T Memory Timing, and Async Latency Value are all configurable.
The last settings under the Cell Menu are the Adjust PCIE x16 and x1 Frequency settings, as well as north and south bridge voltage settings. You can also disable the PCI Clock and set the Spread Spectrum here.