![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Thursday , August 14, 2008
- Author:
- Daniel Dobrowolski
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
MSI K9N2 Diamond
MSI brings us their K9N2 based on NVIDIA’s 780a chipset. Does being able to turn off that power hungry video card get your attention? On paper this board has a lot to offer but how does it work in the real world?
BIOS
MSI used American Megatrends Inc. BIOS for their K9N2 Diamond. The BIOS was generally easy to use and is laid out well. 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, drive detection information, floppy drive configuration settings and a System Information submenu. The System Information screen contains basic processor information. CPU ID, CPU Frequency, BIOS version, physical memory, cache size and L3 cache size are all displayed here. The Advanced BIOS Features menu contains the usual Full Screen Logo display, IOAPIC, MPS Table, and Primary Graphics Adapter settings. PCI Latency can also be adjusted here. There are four submenus here for CPU Feature, Chipset Feature, Boot Sequence, and Trusted Computing. The CPU Feature menu only contains the SVM Support option. You can enable or disable it if you wish. The Chipset Feature submenu contains HPET, Hybrid SLI and On-Chip VGA settings. When you enable On-Chip VGA a setting appears to control how much shared memory the VGA subsystem takes.
The Integrated Peripherals section contains all the standard control options for enabling or disabling onboard integrated hardware and configuring options for that integrated hardware. There are also two submenus. The first is the On-Chip ATA Devices menu which is where the Integrated drive controllers can be set to legacy IDE mode, AHCI, or RAID modes. The I/O Devices menu contains RS232 port settings. You can set the address or disable the port. Power Management Setup is next. This simply contains the ACPI function settings as well as the ACPI Stand buy state and other related settings. The HW Monitor contains Chassis intrusion detection settings, Smart Fan settings and PC Health Status information. The PC Health Status Information contains CPU and system temperatures along with CPU, Sys FAN1&2 speeds and voltages for the CPU VCore and the 3.3v, 5v, and 12v rails.
The Cell Menu is where MSI keeps all the performance tuning and overclocking settings. The current CPU and DRAM frequencies are displayed at the top. This section contains the AMD TLB Fix setting along with D.O.T. Control, AMD Cool ‘n’ Quiet settings and of course CPU FSB frequency and CPU ratio settings. The next section of the Cell menu contains the Advanced DRAM configuration options. From the main Cell Menu you can only change the FSB/DRAM Ratio. The Adjusted DRAM Frequency appears at the bottom of the section. To actually adjust the memory you have to go into the Advanced DRAM Configuration menu. The Advanced DRAM Configuration menu looks rather simple and devoid of options until you set the DRAM Timing mode from Auto to Manual. Once you do that it is a whole different ball game. You have the full myriad of RAM timings including tRCD, tRP, tRAS, tRIP, tRC, tWR, tRRD, tWTR, tRPC0, tRPC1, tRPC2, tRPC3 CAS Latency, and so on. Bank Interleaving, 1T/2T Memory Timing, Software Memory Hole, DCT Unganged Mode, and SLI-Ready Memory settings. Hyper Transport Configuration contains SB to AM2 FreqAuto, and SB to AM2 Link settings. Finally there is a User Settings section which allows you to save settings as presets and then load them as you choose.