In this review we take a look at this affordable NVIDIA 750i based motherboard from MSI. It allows you to build an SLI gaming system powered by an Intel S775 CPU. Is this product good enough for the enthusiast? We compare its performance to an X38 based S775 board and also let you explore the BIOS of the MSI with our virtual tour.
Simulated BIOS options & overclocking
Simulated BIOS options
As a mainstream product the board doesn't come with an endlessness amount of BIOS options, instead they offer the common board settings as well as few overclocking and monitoring options. This time I did not take the effort to go picture every BIOS setup page, instead I rebuild the BIOS inside Macromedia Flash and let you folks have a look round for yourself. Do note that the interactive video below is just a simplified version of the original BIOS and that I left out some menu's here and there intentionally. You can navigate through the BIOS by clicking on the menu, click on "ESC" to go back to the previous page.
MSI P7N SLI Platinum - BIOS simulation by Madshrimps.com
Overclocking
Like shown above, there are no in-depth tweaks available for the MSI P7N SLI Platinum, though with nearly 0,4V extra CPU core voltage, up to 3,1V memory voltage and voltage settings for the northbridge, Southbridge and VTT power line you have all the mandatory options to push you setup way past standard specs. The auto overclocking options offer slight performance increments, yet I tried manually overclocking the board and to my surprise I could easily set the board to the same settings others more advanced boards would also hit maximum stability. Off course that was only while using an air cooled Zalman heatsink, later I went on using my modified Prometeia Mach I combined with an Intel E8500 CPU in order to see how far I could really push the board.
Through multiple 3D test from Futuremark I was able to keep the system stable at roughly 4,7 GHz. Not that bad, but this CPU can do a lot more on other boards. The main reason is probable due to the mounting which was really horrible because the chipset heatsink blocking the modified Mach mounting head, the actual CPU temps under heavy stress could go as high as 15°C which is no where near Single Stage Phase Change performance!
Comment
from Massman@ 2008/06/22
Said it already, but I just love the bios thing
Comment
from Cranox@ 2008/06/23
Fault detected
Second page :
ABIT Fatal1ty FP-IN9-SLI: Board overview