![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Thursday , June 12, 2008
- Author:
- Daniel Dobrowolski
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
MSI P45 Platinum
MSI brings their P45 Platinum to the table making use of Intel’s P45 chipset. In addition to building this board around the P45 chipset, MSI has added some new features to their P45 chipset based boards that are certainly worth looking at.
BIOS
MSI used American Megatrends Inc. BIOS for their P45 Platinum. The BIOS felt mushy and sluggish at times and somewhat unresponsive. However I have seen far worse in this area, so it wasn’t a deal breaker for me. As usual the BIOS is laid out in the familiar style we’ve all come to love or loathe since the introduction of Award’s BIOS’ back in the late 1990’s. This is an AMI BIOS and not an Award, but it the resemblance is easy to see. As usual the BIOS is laid out in the familiar DOS style menus with categories represented in the main menu for navigation to settings falling within that category.
The Standard CMOS Features menu contains the time and date settings, basic hard drive configuration, halt settings and a System Information submenus. One thing to note here is that this is the first time I’ve seen the eSATA port identified separately from the other ports in the system. This shows clearly that the board can recognize all 9 possible SATA devices in the BIOS in a non-RAID configuration. The Advanced BIOS Features menu contains BIOS Flash Protection, Full Screen Logo Display, Quick Booting, Numlock, IOAPIC, MPS Table Version settings etc. Here you will also find several other submenus and those are CPU Feature, Chipset Feature, Boot Sequence, and Trusted Computing. The CPU Feature submenus contains the Execute Disable Bit, C1E Support and Set Limit CPUID MaxVal to 3 settings. The Chipset Feature submenu only contains a HPET setting while the Boot Sequence Submenus is self-explanatory. The Trusted Computing submenus has a single setting that can be toggled on or off.
Integrated Peripherals is the next menu of note which contains the settings to enable or disable the boards’ integrated hardware such as the audio controller or secondary SATA/RAID controller. This menu also contains options like the LAN Option ROM and RAID mode control settings. There are two additional submenus here as well. Those are On-Chip ATA Devices and I/O Devices. The Power Management menu contains ACPI and general power management functions that we are all familiar with. The Hardware Monitor has a Chassis Intrusion setting as well as CPU Smart Fan settings. You can also throttle Sys FAN 1 and Sys FAN 2 speeds here. Below that the PC Health Status is displayed. CPU and system temperatures are displayed here along with fan speeds and basic voltage levels. MSI’s Greenpower menu is next. Here the Greenpower is disabled by default. The CPU, DDR and MCH phase control can be set to disable or Auto. The Greenpower Genie information is shown below that and three values are represented there. ICore, Pout, and Efficiency.
The Cell Menu is mostly the same from board to board. Like the Cell Menu found on MSI’s other boards the current CPU and DRAM frequencies are displayed at the top and settings are grouped together divided by lines to make things easier to read. The first group of settings is where I noticed the largest differences between the P45 Platinum and previous MSI offerings. Here you have the Multi-Step OC Booster above the D.O.T. Control, then D.O.T. Control (Dynamic Overclocking Technology) followed by the Intel EIST and C-State technology settings. At the bottom of this section you will find the CPU FSB Frequency which is displayed in its’ actual and QDR values.
Next you’ll find the Advanced DRAM Configuration menu. The first setting leads to another sub menu which contains a multitude of settings for memory adjustment. Below that you can see the FSB/DRAM Ratio setting and the Adjusted DRAM Frequency (MHZ) is displayed below that. In the Advanced DRAM Configuration submenu you’ll find all the configuration options for CAS latency and other timing adjustments. There are also several settings that can be adjusted for both Channel A and Channel B separately. At the top of the Advanced DRAM Configuration menu is the Memory-Z submenu. In that submenu is another submenu that actually allows you to read the memory modules SPD and EPP information. You can do this for all installed memory modules. What is interesting to note is the fact that the SPD information was incorrect for two different types of memory modules that I tried. The timings and the speeds were incorrect for both modules. Also the board seems to be incapable of reading the EPP information found on both of these modules as well. When viewing the EPP information the system would sometimes hard lock necessitating a power cycle of the machine. Other times it would read some values but not all of the.
As you can see in the screenshot the voltages and bandwidth information appears to be corrupted. The CAS latency support numbers are also incorrect for both the modules I tried. The last menu allows for the user to save their settings and reload them if they need to do so for some reason. This is nothing unusual as most motherboards include some type of feature such as this in their enthusiast boards.