X58 To The Max: Three New Flagship LGA 1366 Motherboards

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Supporting Intel’s highest-performance processors with twice the bandwidth of its mainstream counterpart, the X58 chipset proves the staying power of good ideas. We take a closer look at what makes the latest generation of premium motherboards special.

Big Bang-XPower BIOS

MSI’s Cell Menu contains primary clock and voltage settings, with separate submenus for memory timings and signal amplitude control.

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Choosing the Memory-Z submenu takes the user though several steps to a single XMP memory reading. We would have preferred to see both XMP configurations for our modules.

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The Advanced DRAM submenu allows timings to be set per-channel, but thankfully defaults to a single set of timings for all channels.

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The ClockGen Tuner submenu contains only CPU and PCIe amplitude controls.

MSI’s M-Flash menu directs the PC to a protected-mode user interface, where the BIOS can be updated or stored to non-bootable drives, including most USB flash drives.

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An Overclocking Profile menu allows up to six BIOS configurations to be stored separately with custom names and descriptions.

Thomas Soderstrom
Thomas Soderstrom
Thomas Soderstrom is a Senior Staff Editor at Tom's Hardware US. He tests and reviews cases, cooling, memory and motherboards.