MSI P35 Platinum Motherboard
BIOS and Overclocking
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The BIOS itself is impressive and reflects much of the customizability that we typically see in extremely high end boards. However, a missing feature many power users (even those on a budget) ask for is the ability to specify maximum temperatures and voltages the board can reach before it will automatically be shut down. Other than that, the PC Health Status section gives you the standard temperature, fan speed, and voltages you would expect in any modern motherboard.
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The Cell Menu is where the overclocking of the CPU takes place, and MSI includes a D.O.T. control mechanism, which allows for an easy, percentage based overclocking of your CPU, the PCIe interface, or both. Because we’re using an Extreme Edition CPU, we can also change the multiplier on our X6800 for a high FSB overclock within the Cell menu, but more on that just a little later.
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And finally as you can see from above, the customizability is also evident in the DRAM timing section of the BIOS, allowing you to customize your memory for the timings that you desire.
As for overclocking the board, we used a 7X multiplier and gradually cranked up the board’s front side bus and voltages. Our highest stable overclock that got us into windows and through a series of 3DMark06 loops was 475MHz, ending up at a final clock speed of 3.325GHz. These initial results aren’t spectacular, but definitely show that the P35 and Bearlake family in general have some serious overclocking headroom under their hoods.
