Labs Update: MSI's BIOS gets a nice update.
When we first had a look at MSI's premium high-end board in Issue 105 what we found was perhaps less than stellar overclocking performance, something that perplexed and bamboozled us a little - and something that we've found to be changed.
Speaking to MSI's Product Manager Jerry Lee, he got us in contact with a BIOS engineer at MSI who was able to provide us with the latest revision of the BIOS that, at least on the surface, appeared to clear up all our issues with the board.
Reflashing our P55-GD80 sample with this latest revision, plonking in the Core i7 870 chip, 4GB of DDR3 1600MHz 8-8-8-24 and whacking a Noctua NH-U12P SE2 heatsink on top, we set about running our stock performance tests to see how this newer BIOS revision measured up.
In the image below the performance is clearly higher across pretty much every facet; scoring 18268 in Cinebench (up from 16928), 26.91s in PiFast (up from 27.21s), 7.776s in wPrime (up from 8.315s) though the memory bandwidth remained relatively unchanged.
Our overclocking endeavours were much improved from that original BIOS, allowing a maximum stable speed of 4140MHz to be hit which resulted in a huge performance increase. To reach this clockspeed Intel's EIST technology had to be disabled in the BIOS, but aside from this small bugbear the issues seem to have been completely resolved. It's even faster at stock than the prerelease GIGABYTE mobo we tested the Core i7 870 in just before launch.
It's a good sign that those adopters of MSI's P55 tech at launch can look forwards to a board identical in overclocking prowess to the competition, and there's no reason now (apart from price) that we can think of to stop us recommending this board as a decent choice. It also goes to show the importance of a solid BIOS.
Issue: 111 | April, 2010