BIOS Features

The X58 Platinum uses Award BIOS Version 1.10. This is the latest non-beta version available through MSI’s website.

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This is the main menu screen you get when you boot into the BIOS. There are two special sections on Green Power and M-Flash that should be interesting to users. More to follow below.



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Pressing F1 pops up this Help screen above.



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Pressing F4 pops up a CPU specs screen to give uses a quick snapshot of the CPU configuration.


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Pressing F5 gives users a detailed view of the RAM DIMM location and timings.



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The items in the Standard CMOS Features menu include some basic setup items for SATA, IDE, and eSATA.



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The System Information tab shows a quick overview of the CPU configuration.



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The Advanced BIOS Features menu allows users to configure BIOS flash protection full screen logo display, boot up num-lock LED, IOAPIC function, MPS table version, primary graphics adapter, and the PCI latency timer. It also leads to sub-menus on CPU features, chipset features, boot sequence, and trusted computing.



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The Integrated Peripherals menu configures USB, LAN, Firewire, RAID, and HD audio settings.



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Stand Power Management menu. Nothing too special to point out here.



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Standard Hardware Monitor menu includes a chassis intrusion setting as well as the normal PC health information.



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The Green Power menu gives users a host of options for making the CPU, chipset, and RAMS more energy efficient. It also gives some new information about how many amps your CPU uses as well as your power supply’s efficiency rating.



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The Cell menu is where all the overclocking magic happens. Changes to the CPU multiplier, base clock, QPI link, Turbo Boost, and RAM all happen in this section. Users can also modify the voltage settings in this menu to help with overclocking.



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I think this is the THIRD screen in the BIOS that gave me access to basic CPU specifications. Maybe MSI can reduce redundancy a bit and only add one CPU specs menu in their next revision of this BIOS?



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QPI links and frequency can be accessed through this sub-menu. QPI frequencies can only be set to Auto or 4.8 GT/s. This is a bit misleading because much of the documentation I read about this board says it can handle 6.4 GT/s. Maybe this setting only will be available on the i7-965.



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The Memory-Z menu gives users access to each individual DIMM’s configuration.



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Here’ is one of the DIMM’s information.  There are no settings to change here; it is mainly for informational purposes only.



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The Advance DRAM configuration menu is where all the memory timings can be configured manually.



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Memory ratios can be set from Auto to 7 through the Cell menu.



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The ClockGen Tuner menu controls CPU amplitude, PCI-E amplitude, CPU CLK skew, and IOH CLK skew.

 

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PCI frequencies can be set to Auto, 37.3, or 42 in the Cell menu.



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The bottom of the Cell menu gives users access to a variety of voltages for various devices. The main ones we use for overclocking is the CPU Voltage, QPI Voltage, and DRAM Voltage.



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The User Settings menu allows users to save four different “profiles” for different computer configurations. This is helpful for overclockers and those who want different settings for different scenarios.



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The M-Flash memory will update or load a new BIOS from a USB drive. The M-Flash function allows users to flash the BIOS from a USB drive or other storage devices or allows the system to boot from the BIOS file inside the USB drive.

The functionality and extended features in the X58 Platinum’s BIOS really gives overclockers a host of options for tweaking their CPUs, chipset, and DRAM. We’ll definitely need each one of those options during the overclocking section of this review.

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