CoreCenter

Looking back at the BIOS options, in the H/W monitor section you could change the speed of the CPU and NB fan, through the CoreCenter application you can do the same thing, either let them be controlled automatically, slowing down and spinning up when needed; or set the speed manually. The fan speed is changed by lowering the voltage to the fan; this can cause the FAN to stop spinning when the voltage drops below the fan’s threshold which is different for every fan.

The NB fan ran perfectly at the lowest setting, and it was completely silent!



The speed can be adjusted in 8 steps; the CPU fan used stopped at 3/8 of its full speed, not too bad as it was quite silent at that setting!



The CoreCenter utility displays the most important voltage lines as well as CPU/System temperature and CPU/NB fan speed. But it can do a bit more then just reporting values.



If you expand the right panel you get to adjust the Temperature and Fan Speed alarm, the Left extended panel controls FSB, Vcore, Vmem and AGP voltage. These can not be increased beyond “safe” levels, if you want more then you’ll have to go through the BIOS.

All in all a very useful utility which allows you to control the CoreCell chip on the motherboard through Windows.

MSI LiveUpdate



Another interesting tool is the MSI Live update monitor, it will compare the versions of your BIOS, System and video card drivers to the latest once it got listed at the MSI site, and will propose and upgrade when it detects a newer version. Very user friendly and easy to use.




Flashing the BIOS in Windows is quite easy, but make sure you don’t have any applications running in the background; after a reboot you’ll have to reset the BIOS to your preferred settings.

nVidia Firewall

The new nVidia south bridge also features a hardware firewall which needs to be configured through a web console; unfortunately I did not get it working as launching the local firewall website manager gave me an empty page. MSI is currently looking into the problem; this section will be updated with more info as soon as I have it. The firewall is the same one as found on the A64 nVidia nForce3 chipset as seen here.



Onto our conclusion ->