Checking Out The BIOS
I don’t really like using pictures to show a motherboard’s BIOS, so I attempted to create a video tour of this one. Unfortunately, my camera only shoots up to 640×480 which isn’t nearly enough to show text in detail. So that will have to wait for another review down the road.
For now, here’s how the BIOS looks, starting with the temperature control page:
MSI smartly included a “smart” CPU fan controller on this board, allowing you to set a target temperature at which the CPU fan runs at full speed. In the picture above, I had the heatsink slightly off-center (I don’t fully install heatsinks on our test bench, just sitting a Thermalright 120mm heatsink does the trick most of the time), so the temperature rose above the 60 degree target. This causes the fan to run at 1200 RPM. As soon as I adjusted the heatsink placement, the fan began slowing down to about 600 RPM, which made it virtually silent. You can also set the minimum speed to various rates. The SYS fan can also be controlled, but only manually.
Next, we’ll look at the main tweaking/overclocking page, which MSI calls “Cell Menu”. It’s a long page, so had to be broken down into two photos (click for higher res):
I have to say, this is one of the better “overclocking” BIOS pages I’ve seen, although it probably should have been split up into two tabs. All the important settings immediately update you with the results of changes, and the “Help Item” menu is very detailed (if filled with spelling mistakes). Here is how the main settings break down:
| Reference Clock | 190-690 MHz (1 MHz) |
| CPU Multiplier | Yes |
| DRAM Ratio | 1:2, 1:2.66, 1:3.33, 1:4 |
| GPU Clock | 150-1500 MHz (1 MHz) |
| PCI-E Clock | 90-190 MHz (1MHz) |
| CPU Vcore | 1.02-1.97V (10mV) |
| IMC Voltage | 0.39-1.46V (1mV) |
| Northbridge Voltage | 1.05-21.65V (6.25mV) |
| Southbridge Voltage | 0.89-1.40V (5.3mV) |
| DRAM Voltage | 0.97-2.45V (~8mV) |
| CAS Latency | 4-12 Cycles |
| tRCD | 5-12 Cycles |
| tRP | 5-12 Cycles |
| tRAS | 15-30 Cycles |
Pretty much everything you need is right there on this page, which is a good thing and bad.
MSI does add a couple more goodies to the BIOS, including the ability to flash right from the main menu, without the need to boot into DOS:
Dubbed M-Flash, I wasn’t able to test it out, since there is no new BIOS available for this board post-production. It looks simple enough though, and also allows you to back up the current BIOS to a USB drive.
And no decent overclocking board should be without the ability to save profiles. Luckily, MSI does just that with “Overclocking Profile”:
It is very simple, and works well.
Overall, I have to admit that the 890GXM-G65 does way more with its BIOS than I would have expected. mATX boards have come a long way in the past few years, thanks in part to more robust chipsets. If you were to just look at the BIOS, you would have no idea that this is a mATX motherboard.
And now we get to find out how it performs against other mATX boards!
Great review! I like it a lot, mostly what I was looking at was the conclusion as I’m just about to buy that board. It is overpriced indeed, but funny fact is that I am actually sitting in the situation where I need “Crossfire 8x/8x support in a micro ATX form factor”, so thanks for confirming this!
Cheers
[...] contains a Radeon HD 4290 GPU. We first experienced this chipset March 2010 when we reviewed the MSI 890GXM-G65 motherboard. To call this a 1 year old chipset is somewhat misleading however, as the Northbridge is almost [...]