MSI 790GX-G65 Motherboard Review :: BIOS and Overclocking

The 790GX-GX65 comes with a modified version of the American Megatrends AMIBIOS with a few things for MSI boards. The main menu is split into Standard CMOS Features, Advanced BIOS Features, Integrated Peripherals, Power Management Setup, HW Monitor, Green Power, BIOS Setting Password, and Cell Menu.

The Standard CMOS feature is where the Date, Time, HDD detection, FDD and System Information is located. System information showed AMD Phenom II X4 810 Processor, the CPU Frequency, the BIOS version, the physical memory, the Cache size and L3 Cache size. Advanced BIOS Features is where the CPU Features, the Chipset Features, the Boot sequence and Trusted Computing are located.

Chipset feature is where the Onboard graphics is set. You can set the onboard graphics to UMA, SIDEPORT, UMA+SIDEPORT. The shared memory allocated to the integrat3ed graphics are Auto-512MB. UMA Location is either above or below depending on whether you need a RAMDISK. SidePort Memory Frequency can be set from 1066-1700MHz.

The Cell Menu is where the majority of tweaking of the board happens. Thhe main Cell menu is split into CPU Specifications, Memory-Z, Advance DRAM Configuration, and HT Link Control submenus. The overclocking of the CPU is done on the main Cell Menu where you can adjust the FSB, the CPU Ratio, the CPU-MB Ratio and change the voltages without accessing a submenu.

I was able to overclock the 2.6GHz Phenom II x4 810 to 2.9GHz, this is a 15% increase over the standard clock speed by using the Overclocking Center utility that MSI provides on their driver CD. The CPU cooler I was using is the reference cooler than came with the 940 CPU, meaning that with better cooling I'm sure the overclocking would have been better.

BIOS Screenshots