![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Thursday , May 24, 2007
- Author:
- Daniel Dobrowolski
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
MSI P6N-SLI Platinum
The MSI P6N-SLI Platinum is based on NVIDIA’s lowest end SLI compatible chipset, the 650 SLI. MSI has a done a great job with the P6N-SLI Platinum overall, but it still has a few issues that need to be addressed. Maybe MSI is on the comeback trail?
BIOS
The P6N-SLI uses the American Megatrends Inc. BIOS. Version 1.22 was used for testing.
The main BIOS screen has all the headings and submenus for various categories. Standard CMOS, hardware monitoring and so on. The Standard CMOS Features screen contains time and date, system information and basic hard disk, optical and floppy drive configuration settings.
Advanced BIOS Features contains Boot Sector Protection, Full Screen Logo display, Quick Booting, IOAPIC Functions, and MPS Table Version. Additionally there are three submenus that contain additional settings. CPU Feature, Chipset Feature, and Boot Sequence. Under CPU Feature, there are only two settings. They are Execute Bit Support and Set Limit CPUID MaxVal to 3. Under Chipset Feature there is but one setting: HPET enabled or disabled. Boot sequence as you can imagine contain boot settings. 1st through 4th boot device settings and boot other device YES/NO.
Integrated peripherals contains USB controller settings and allows the user to enable or disable onboard devices like the LAN and HD Audio controllers. LAN Option ROM can also be enabled or disabled here as can the onboard eSATA port located on the backplane. Two additional submenus are contained here as well. Those are: On Chip ATA Devices and I/O Devices. On-Chip IDE Controller, PCI IDE BusMaster, On-Chip SATA Controller and RAID mode settings are found here as well. I/O Devices contains only two settings: COM Port and Parallel Port addresses. Additionally those ports can be disabled here.
Power Management Setup is the next menu. It contains standard ACPI and power management settings and is standard fare found on any other AMI BIOS equipped motherboard made for the DIY market. You’ll also find the PNP/PCI Configuration menu to contain all the usual settings. The H/W Monitor menus contains chassis intrusion CPU Smart FAN Target, CPU Min Fan Speed, and PC Health Status. Temperatures and voltages are displayed in the lower section of this menu. This allows you to monitor the voltages and CPU temperatures for suspected problems.
Finally we come to the Cell Menu. This is the section the enthusiast will be concerned about. This section contains memory timings, FSB settings, CPU multiplier and so on.
At the very top of the Cell Menu, current CPU frequency, FSB frequency and DRAM frequency are displayed. Below this is where you will find D.O.T. Control, (Dynamic Overclocking Technology) Intel EIST, System Clock mode and Adjust CPU Ratio. Dynamic overclocking control allows overclocking from 1% to 10% to be performed by the system automatically. The system will enable all the necessary settings associated with the profile automatically. I found that this worked ok until 7% in which case the system would constantly lock up. Intel EIST is the Enhanced Intel Speed Step technology from intel, which you can disable or enabled. System Clock mode has three settings: Auto, Linked and Manual. Automatic is the default setting. Manual allows you to set your memory and FSB speeds independently from one another, (which doesn’t work that well) or you can use linked mode which keeps those two settings synchronous to one another. The latter worked better for overclocking in my tests (more on that later.) Adjust CPU Ratio is the CPU clock multiplier which is only adjustable downward on non-Extreme Edition series processors.
Next is the Advanced DRAM Configuration settings: tCL (CAS Latency), tRCD, (Row Address to Column Address Delay), tRP (Row Precharge Time), tRAS (Row Active Time), tRRD (Row Active to Row Active Delay), tRC (Row Cylce Time), tWR (Write Recovery Time), tWTR (Internal Write to Read Command Delay). And finally, tREF (Refresh Rate) and Command Per Clock (CMD). After the DRAM timing settings you’ll find all your voltage settings. Here is where it gets somewhat ugly as CPU voltage choices are sorely lacking here. Basically you can choose how much voltage to add to the stock voltage auto-detected by the motherboard from the CPU. You can only add up to .28 volts or so to the CPU voltage. Fortunately the E6300 I used for testing doesn’t need a lot of voltage and by adjusting the multiplier to 6, I was able to keep the CPU out of the equation to a large degree, and only stress the motherboards actual overclocking capabilities. (More on that in the overclocking section.) Spread Spectrum is the final section under the Cell Menus. CPU Spread Spectrum, PCIE Spread Spectrum, CPU/LDT Spread Spectrum and SATA Spread Spectrum are all represented here.