One Tough Cookie: 10 Boards with Intel i875P Chipset: Part I

MSI I875P Neo (MS-6758): BIOS Tuning From The Fab, Continued

View of the ports in the MSI-board : six USB-jacks are exemplary.

All right ! Color-coded pin block.

Logic for uncomplicated overclocking : Core Cell.

Overclockers might find fault with the following : after adjusting aggressive RAM timings in BIOS, the board hangs during the boot process, requiring a CMOS-Reset. It would be helpful here to have a kind of return function to the standard timings, as is usual with most of the competitors. It should also be noted that the AGP always runs at 1.55 volts ; 1.5 volts is standard. Serious problems emerged at the start of the test in conjunction with the seven different DDR400 modules : only four modules ran perfectly.

Only after numerous updates and several days of continuous configuration did we finally manage to get the Version 1.31 to work virtually error-free. However, we still couldn’t boot in so-called SPD mode (automatic reading of the RAM timings) at 200 MHz FSB in conjunction with the Kingston, GeIL and Kingmax RAM modules. Only an increase in the power from 2.5 volts to 2.6 volts fixes things, but the system does not run completely stably.

The above table lists all the timings of the modules we used, which are reliably read out using a diagnostic tool. A measurement for the speed is the achieved frame rate in Quake III Demo 1 (640 x 480 x 16).