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The BIOS is your usual AWARD fare, here's MSI's opening take on things.
Opening salvo
There are then a couple of sections in the BIOS where you will no doubt spend most of your time if you enjoy tweaking your hardware. The first is the Advanced Chipset Features section where you have the front side bus and memory speed controls, memory timing options and the AGP controller options.
Advanced Chipset Features
The screenshot above shows the test settings as used for the benchmarks. 133MHz front side bus and 2000MHz means an XP2400+ test CPU with 4:5 memory ratio for PC2700 memory speed asynchrous to the front side bus frequency. The memory timing options are quite impressive with a large selection of possible values for the T-ras, T-rcd and T-rp options and the usual CL adjustment.
Memory ratio support on nForce2 is up there with anything SiS can do with their northbridges!
Memory ratios
Finally we have the voltage controls and CPU multiplier control and some AGP/PCI related options in the Frequency/Voltage Control section of the BIOS.
Frequency/Voltage Control
You can see the obvious AGP lock with 66MHz being the standard frequency and the recommended one to stick to. However the MSI doesn't tie PCI frequency to 1:2 AGP which is a shame. Increasing front side bus speed has influence over PCI bus speed using the usual dividers. It supports 1/5 at 166MHz but it's unclear if it implements 1/6 at 200MHz which will be needed if the board is to support the upcoming 200MHz bus Barton processors.
CPU multiplier control lets you change multiplier on an unlocked processor but unlike some recent KT400 and other nForce2 boards, it doesn't unlock my test XP2400+ so you'll have to unlock your CPU manually on this board if multiplier adjustment is your thing.
Combined with no PCI lock and the lack of heatsink holes means the board drops even further down in the enthusiasts estimation.
In it's favour, it does have decent support for voltage adjustment for CPU, memory and AGP port. AGP voltage adjust is often missed out and it seems strange for MSI to include it given its shortcomings in other areas. On graphics cards that derive a memory or core driving voltage from the AGP port voltage, the K7N2-L does help in that regard if you want assistance clocking your graphics hardware.
At least the BIOS is easy to navigate.
Manual and bundle wise, I expect it to match up to MSI's usual high standards in that regard but since the review sample is a simple 'white box' sample consisting of board and cobbled together driver CD I can't comment fully. However from what I've seen on past MSI boards, I'm led to believe you'll recieve an excellent manual and their excellent D and S bracket expansions to give you extra audio connection options and your extra USB2.0 ports.
So how does it perform?
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