MSI X58 Eclipse SLI Motherboard Review :: MSI X58 Eclipse BIOS and Overclocking

MSI uses the American Megatrends AMIBIOS with a few modifications for their purposes. The Main Menu is split into Standard CMOS Features, Advanced BIOS Features, Integrated Peripherals, Power Management Setup, H/W Monitor, Green Power, BIOS Setting Password, Cell Men, User Settings, M-Flash, and the standard exit setup menus.

Standard CMOS Features has the Date, Time, the drives present, including the SATA, IDE and E-SATA devices and System Information. Each drive picked up will show the information that the BIOS detects and what details on the Hard disks the system can determine. The System Information screen shows the CPU, the Core Frequency, the BIOS Version, the Physical Memory, and the Cache sizes.

The Advanced Menu is where the Boot Sequence, CPU Feature, Chipset Feature, and Trusted Computing is enabled. Here you also set your Primary Graphics Adapter and enable quick Booting. If you want to install Windows fresh you should set the First Boot Device to CD-ROM as otherwise the system will try to boot off the HDD. I would strongly suggest using the PCI-E option on the Primary Graphics Adapter as otherwise the bandwidth would cripple a modern video card on PCI.

The majority of the overclocking and tweaking on this motherboard is done in the Cell Menu. Here there are numerous settings for the various settings. In this chart I list the various settings of the BIOS. Note that overclocking can be done either through the Dynamic Overclocking Technology (DOT) or manually on the board. DOT has a preset group of overclocking settings but it is better to overclock with manually as you have more control of the speeds.

MSI X58 Eclipse
Setting	Range
Base Clock	133-400MHz in 1MHz increments
QPI	4.8GT/s (Core i7 920, 940), 6.4GT/second (965EE)
PCIe	100-200MHz in 1MHz increments
PCI	37.3, 42MHz
DRAM Multiplier	3x-8x
CPU Voltage	-0.32-0.625V in 0.01 or 0.0V increments
QPI Voltage	-0.32-+0.65V in 0.1-0.2v increments
DRAM Voltage	1.2-2.77V in 0.01V increments
CPU PLL Voltage	1-2.43V in 0.01-0.05V increments
IOH Voltage	0.75-1.73V in 0.01-0.05V increments
ICH Voltage	0.7-2.13V in 0.01-0.05V increments
DRAM Channel A-C CA ref Voltage	0.435-1.15V in 0.005-0.025v increments
DRAM Channel A-C DQ ref voltage	0.435-1.15V in 0.005-0.025v increments

Overclocking on the board seems to be robust with up to a 4GHz Base clock possible from a default of 1333MHz (133x10). I was able to overclock the 2.67GHz Core i7 920 to 3.4GHz on the normal cooling of the reference cooler. While that is not the highest overclock I've ever seen on this platform the other overclock was on a massive cooler.

BIOS Shots