Bundle and BIOS
A board is nothing without its bundle...
What a lovely box!
The bundle includes user's and setup guides, along with the requisite driver and utility CD. There's the fabled SLI connector and a bracket for securing it in place across two cards, which has a grille in it too.
Also included are USB 2.0 and FireWire brackets for attaching to the on-board headers. MSI has kindly provided rounded IDE and floppy cables. The provided SATA cables, however, are not ClickConnect, which means they don't make best use of the onboard connectors.
The bundle, then, is suitable for the board, but there are no real surprises, nice or nasty.
BIOS
The "Cell" is a component of the MSI mainboard designed for hardware status monitoring and tweaking. In the BIOS, the Cell menu consists mainly of frequency adjustment. 'Cool n Quiet' is disabled by default, which for some is a good thing, while others would rather it be enabled by default.
MSI have made overclocking look like a game, seemingly with various difficulty levels. Perhaps an interesting analogy, but might such a feature lure in an inexperienced user and cause them trouble?
There's some tweakability, but it's not as variable as with some BIOSes we've seen. Here's a breakdown:
| HT Reference Clock | 200-425MHz (200-210MHz (0.5MHz increments), 210-425MHz (1MHz increments)) |
|---|---|
| CPU FID | x5-CPU MAX. FID (x1 increments) |
| PCI-E Clock | 100-145MHz (1 / 2MHz increments) |
| HT Multiplier (CPU-SPP) | 1-5x (200/400/600/800/1000MHz) |
| Memory | 400/533/667/800MHz |
| CPU VID | 0.800-CPU MAX. VID (0.025v increments) |
| CPU VCORE Offset | 0.00-0.35v (0.05v increments) |
| Memory VDIMM | 1.80-2.45v (0.05v increments) |
Overall, there are a few features of the BIOS missing that prevent it from being ideal for enthusiasts. Nevertheless, it should be up for some moderate overclocking.
