BIOS Features
The BIOS on the MSI Big Bang XPower motherboard comes packed with options and overclocking settings that will make beginners and the most experienced overclockers smile.
The BIOS has reasonable fan controls and system monitoring though I would like to see a return to the days of more granular control that we loved to play with.
The Cell Menu is where all the magic happens for the XPower and has the options for CPU features like HyperThreading and Turbo Boost, base clock speed, multipliers and more.
The Active Processor Cores settings allow us to disable any number of the 6 cores in our Core i7-980X processor.
The Turbo Boost settings are useful for engineering samples, Extreme Edition parts and the new Intel K-series of CPUs that will allow you to set these options HIGHER than standard right out of the box.
The XPower supports base clock speeds as high as 600 MHz!!
If you have a ES, EE or K-series part you will also be able to just manually adjust the primary CPU multiplier up to as much as 60x should you find a magical formula and be able to use it.
There is no shortage of memory options on the XPower either and you have the ability to set linked or unlinked memory frequencies, change QPI multipliers and speeds, enabled XMP support for automatic overclocking of the DDR3 memory and…
…set the options for each module manually.
Voltages are well represented on the motherboard as well with adjustments for everything from the primary CPU voltage to the south bridge controller. Options scale far across the voltage spectrum to allow for as much overclocking as you are comfortable with.
The MSI BIOS includes an integrated BIOS flashing tool as well as the ability to backup a BIOS (with settings) to save or share with others.
Having profiles allows a user to save a base settings that they can easily revert to should further adjustments make something unstable, etc.
