MSI 890GXM-G65 Review

BIOS and Software

Published: 28th May 2010 | Source: MSI | Price: £110.45 | Author: Bryan Waters

BIOS and Software

The G65 comes with the AMI BIOS we're all very used to now. Because of this we'll focus on the overclocking features available to us. With the BIOS being so mature, and MSI being very good at what they do, we have all the options we'd expect to see. One of the good things is the adjusted CPU frequency which gives a "live, at a glance" display of the CPU speed you can expect to see upon reboot.

If you're the kind of person who always despairs at the low amount of tweaking available to you, then get a load of these voltages available to us. 3.725v on the DRAM! Nearly 2v on the CPU. Whatever the limit you find, you can be sure it wont be because you haven't got enough juice.

Software

MSI's installation CD both looks the part and does the job. As our initial tests were one with an external graphics card in place, it did keep loading up the Catalyst Installation program.

Under the "MSI Utility" heading we have the Control Center which gives us all the information we could desire about our board, RAM and processor, as well as giving us some overclocking control.

As well as providing us with sliders which we can use to control our overclock, we have four presets we can apply. These, as with most manufacturer presets, are so mild as to be able to double as baby shampoo. But nonetheless should you desire the tiniest of tweaks, they are there.

Slightly curiously we have tweaks for most of our RAM settings. Nice thing to have I suppose, but as the "basic" overclocking only gives us three voltages and a FSB to adjust, to then have the ability to adjust the TRFC2 in advanced mode seems to be a definition of sublime to the ridiculous.

Worryingly the actual slider adjustments don't seem to either display, or affect, the hardware. As we can see from this screenshot, with Cool 'n' Quiet off, the CPU voltage in particular bears almost no relation to the actual Vcore.

Probably best used for information purposes only and leave your tweaking to the BIOS.