BIOS
MSI continue to use Award BIOSes. Like many others now, MSI's got its own advanced hardware monitoring system, one that's dubbed CoreCell.
Cell Menu is where all the action's at. MSI still hasn't caught up with ABIT or DFI in offering the user the ability to save and load various BIOS configurations. There's simply a high performance default config.
As you may already know, NVIDIA's seen fit to bump up the HyperTransport link to a bi-directional 800MHz. That translates to 3.2GB/s each way. It's a necessary measure when one considers the amount of traffic, both on-chip and discrete-driven, that the nForce3 250Gb can generate. MSI's included a high performance system setting that boosts performance by just under 1% without resorting to driven clock inflation. MSI uses a strange system for voltage manipulation. DDR and AGP lines are increased by 0.05/0.1v increments but CPU voltage increases are expressed in percentages. Speaking of which, DDR tops out at a reasonable 2.85v, AGP at 1.8v, and CPU at 18% above default.
Another bonus is having discrete clocks for both CPU and AGP/PCI. Driven clock can be increased to a modest 250MHz and AGP from 66-100MHz. You can, of course, run, say, a driven clock of 240MHz and keep AGP/PCI buses steady at the default 66/33MHz. Precisely the scenario that enthusiasts have been looking forward to since the September '03 launch of AMD's S754 CPUs and associated motherboards. There's also support for Cool'n'Quiet technology and manual multiplier selection (4x - 20x) and MSI's Dynamic Overclocking Technology (DOT) that modules speed with respect to load.
Pretty standard timings for any nForce3 board. The problem is not in the setting, it's in obtaining RAM that works well with extremely low latencies. Winbond BH5, if you can find it, is the way to go for excellent stock performance.
We mentioned that one of the nForce3 250Gb's biggest assets is in the flexibility of storage management. We have a total of 8 channels, split 4 each between SATA and PATA. Given a large enough case, 2TB of RAIDable storage isn't out of the question. Scary, eh?.
There's also explicit control over both on-chip and PHY-driven SATA. NVIDIA's GbE MAC (remember the Realtek transceiver from the previous page), FireWire and USB2.0 make sure that NV's beefed-up HyperTransport link is kept busy.
MSI's reporting section isn't the best. There's no mention of DDR voltage, CPU voltage appears to undervolt more than usual, and there's no provision for manually controlling fans' speed. We reckon that MSI could improve the K8N Neo by adding 3v+ DDR support, incorporating some form of BIOS-saving feature, and providing more voltage information in the above section. Not bad but not great
