MSI DKA790GX Platinum Motherboard Review :: BIOS

MSI uses a modified version of the American Megatrends AMIBIOS with their DKA790GX motherboard. The BIOS is split into Standard CMOS Features, Advanced BIOS Features, Integrated Peripherals, Power Management Setup, H/W Monitor, BIOS Setting Password, Cell Menu, User Settings, Load Fail-Safe Defaults, Load Optimized Defaults, Save and Exit Setup, and Exit without saving submenus.

The Advanced Menu is where you enable or disable the full screen LOGO; enable Quick Boot, Boot Up Num-Lock LED, IOAPIC Function, MPS Table Version, set the Primary Graphics Adapter, PCI Latency Timer and CPU Feature. CPU Feature is where you enable High Precision Event Timers, the onboard VGA and the amount of memory used for the framebuffers of the onboard video up to 512MB. The DKA790GX has 128MB of Sideport memory which allows the 790GX to use the 128MB in addition to standard onboard memory.

BIOS chip

Integrated Peripherals is where you enable the USB Controller, USB Legacy Device Support, Onboard LAN, LAN Option ROM, Onboard IEEE-1394 controller, Onboard Audio controller, On-chip ATA devices, and I/O Devices. The On-chip ATA devices is where you enable the PCI IDE Busmaster and On-chip SATA Controller. Here is also where you enable RAID. The HW Monitor is where the current system temperatures, voltages and fan speeds are displayed.

Overclockers and tweakers will want to use the Cell Menu due to the fact that that is where the overclocking and tweaking of the system is done. I was able to overclock the board using the ACC to +10% of the actual clock. This is pretty mundane by most overclocking standards but excellent for the CPU and motherboard chipset that I used as the 9850 has limited overclocking potential normally. The board overclocks well with the CPU and that’s what is important.