![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Wednesday, May 06, 2009
- Author:
- Daniel Dobrowolski
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
MSI Eclipse SLI X58 Motherboard
The MSI Eclipse SLI is the premeir X58 motherboard for the Intel Core i7 processor. The design is great looking, it is feature-rich, and comes from a great company with a history of excellent products. So how did we like it and why had it taken this review so long to be published?
Overclocking Center
MSI has bundled a very simple and easy to use overclocking utility called the Overclocking Center with the Eclipse. The utility is fairly straight forward. On the first screen you can see that what is displayed is mostly informational and little more. The memory and PCI tabs are much the same; purely informational. Once you click on the D.O.T. link at the top of the window it takes you to where the work gets done in the application. From here you can either set quick profiles that use presets or custom specified profiles or you can use their Dynamic Overclocking Technology. On the Advanced tab you can manually control voltages and clock speeds. I found this utility to work fairly poorly. Most adjustments would crash the system with either a BSOD or a soft reset whenever I actually tried to apply most settings. As always your mileage may vary, but while MSI was well intentioned here, like so many others their bundled software comes up short.
BIOS
MSI chose the American Megatrends Inc. (AMI) BIOS. Version 1.3B was used for testing. The layout of the AMI BIOS is very standard. All the AMI BIOS ROMs seen on DIY motherboards today usually emulate the appearance and layout of the standard Award BIOS which has been around since the 1990's. On the subject of BIOS ROMs I've got to say that I'm really upset that MSI is going the way of ASUS on their BIOS ROMs. The latest 1.4 BIOS was listed on their site as only being available through a MSI Live Update. I don't know about you but this scares the hell out of me. I've bricked enough boards over the years using this type of BIOS update method that I simply don't trust these types of utilities. This also annoys me as I tend to keep my testing configurations off the internet for various reasons.
The standard CMOS Features menu contains generic listings for SATA devices as well as the time and date settings. Also from here, basic system information can be displayed. The system information displayed is very basic. CPU speed and model information is displayed along with the total RAM installed in the machine.
The Advanced BIOS features screen contains basic settings for things like the full screen logo and IOAPIC functions as well as graphics card ordering. There are also several submenus here for CPU Features, Chipset Features, Boot Sequence and Trusted Computing. The CPU Features menu contains Hyperthreading, Execute Disable Bit, and Overspeed protection settings. Chipset Features just contains the HPET (High Precision Event Timer) setting. Boot sequence is of course, self-explanatory. Trusted computing settings can also be found here.
Integrated Peripherals contains settings pertaining to the configuration of onboard devices such as RAID controllers and integrated IEEE1394a ports. USB and LAN options are also found here. You can enable or disable hardware from here as well as access some of the more advanced features of some hardware such as LAN Boot ROMs. The Drive Booster Controller #1 & #2 menus actually contains quick settings in profile form for the JMicron JMB322 SATA controllers. You can set RAID0, 1, JBOD and normal mode from here. These controllers do not do cross controller RAID nor do they support RAID 5 or 6. They also do not support hot spares or any more advanced functions. You cannot even control the stripe size of these RAID arrays. The On Chip ATA Devices menu contains settings for IDE bus mastering and RAID control. I/O Devices just contains COM Port addressing.
Here we see the standard power management menu which contains basic ACPI settings. Next we have the hardware monitor. This shows voltages, fan speeds, and temperatures of various monitored resources such as the CPU and the north bridge. Fan control can also be performed from here. The Green Power menu contains controls which essentially allow the system to deactivate unnecessary power phases and save energy. There are several power phase indicator LEDs on the motherboard. They can be enabled or disabled from here. Power efficiencies and energy consumption readings are also displayed here.
The Cell Menu is where all the overclocking and general performance settings are found. This menu contains several settings and submenus with more settings for making tons of adjustments to the system. CPU The Cell menu is broken down by categories. Though there are no headers indicating what category a block of settings are for, it is easy to discern. At the very top are your current CPU speeds with multiplier, and current memory clock and QPI frequencies are displayed as well. Next you'll find CPU related settings. The first item is actually a sub menu leading to an informational display concerning the CPU. Next are settings such as Intel EIST, Intel C-State Technology, BCLK, CPU Ratio and the QPI configuration. QPI configuration is a submenu containing QPI link speed and QPI frequency settings.
Next we have the memory settings. Memory-Z being the first of them which is actually a sub-menus. This leads to another submenu where you choose specific DIMM slots, then it allows you to view SPD and XMP profile settings. Back in the main Cell Menu, advanced DRAM timing allows you to set CAS latencies and other memory timing values. XMP memory profiles can be enabled here as well. Memory ratios and Uncore frequency adjustments can also be made from the main Cell menu. Information concerning the adjusted frequencies is listed here to make tuning easier. Next is the Glockgen timer submenu. Beyond that you will find voltage adjustments and frequency adjustments for the PCI-Express and PCI buses. Voltages can generally be set to auto or manually controlled. Spread Spectrum is the final submenu here.
Additionally MSI built in their M-Flash utility for updating and flashing your BIOS. You can also use this utility to make backup copies of your BIOS ROM should you need to restore from an earlier version. M-Flash can also be used to adjust the board’s behavior in regard to booting from either BIOS ROM 1 or 2. All in all there are more features than most people will know what to do with and that's not necessarily a bad thing. MSI has left the user with tons of options for not only tweaking, but for controlling various aspects of the board’s behavior. The user friendliness of the BIOS is about what I've come to expect from MSI. It could be laid out a little better, but it’s solid none the less.