Table of Contents:
MSI uses the AMIBIOS from American Megatrends with their own modifications, which are located in their Cell Menu. The Main screen is split up into Standard CMOS Features, Advanced BIOS Features, Integrated Peripherals, Power Management Setup, H/W Monitor, Green Power, BIOS Setting Password, M-Flash and Overclocking Profile.
The Standard CMOS features are where the Date and Time menus are located. Here’s where the SATA and E-SATA drives are detected. System Information is also located in this spot giving the CPU identification, the Microcode, the CPU Frequency, the BIOS Revision, the onboard physical memory and the cache size on the CPU.
The Advanced BIOS Features is where the Boot Sequence, the BIOS Flash Protection, the Screen logo, and the Quick Boot options are on the motherboard BIOS. If you want to install a new BIOS Enabling the BIOS Flash Protection prevents the BIOS from being updated, so if you need to Flash the BIOS you need to disable this function before doing so.
Overclocking using the OC Genie button, automatically overclocked the 3.0GHz Core i7-950 to 3.73GHz, which is respectable. Using the BIOS settings I was able to hit over 4GHz on air cooling using a Thermaltake Frio CPU cooler, which is a respectable overclock. Using the OC Dashboard, I was able to overclock the CPU to 3.85GHz.
The tweaking of the CPU and system is done in the Cell Menu. This menu is where the CPU Specification, Features and active cores are enabled or disabled. CPU Features are where the EIST, C State, CIE, OverSpeed, and other CPU features are enabled or disabled. The rest of the Cell Menu features are settings, which are used to tweak your system. I’ve compiled a list of the settings on the following chart, which should illustrate the settings:
