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Installation
and BIOS Installation One area
where VIA seem to do well is with regards their driver installation which on balance
goes much smoother than we're used to from nForce boards which can be a pain if
you're upgrading from another chipset without reinstalling your O/S. In fact more
than a pain it can be downright impossible and nForce2 boards are the only boards
where I have a dedicated O/S pre-installed hard drive ready to use for reviewing
rather than starting from scratch on a ghosted copy. MSI keep
things as painless as always with their easy setup utility. It's probably just
a one-off but our installation CD wouldn't read on two of the test drives here,
though I eventually got it running on a third. 
A
sweet selection of handy utilities are also included behind the "MSI Utility"
entry, including of course CoreCell related controll app known as the "MSI
Core Center". which we'll examine a little later. 
BIOS Unlike
their nForce2 BIOS which tends to be known for its rather conservative upper voltage
ranges, this one's a vertitable tweaker's feast. 
Multipliers
range from 6x to 15x though why there's a gaping hole between 10x and 14x is anyone's
guess. These "missing" multipliers are available when set to "Auto",
as witnessed by my being able to run our 3200+ which uses an 11x multiplier. 
Vcore
(CPU voltage) sees an upper range of 2.30v. 
And
the now familiar chipset, or V-Link voltage ranges up to 2.80v. 
While
a generally lethal 3.30v of juice can be piped through your memory, not that I'd
suggest you venture quite so high without some kind of statement of compatibility
from your memory manufacturer. 
And
lastly comes your AGP voltage which I've personally never found to be of any great
use here. This can be hiked up to 2.10v. 
On
the memory side of things there's a very healthy selection of parameters to play
with including some preset "System Performance" settings that are so
aggressive I could only get the lowest setting of "Fast" to work, even
with our super fast Corsair XMS3500LL. 
An
unusually thorough selection of AGP timing settings are also provided. 
And
very much the weakest of the BIOS screens is the "PC HEalth Status"
which gives a relatively good set of system readings but lacks any kind of thermal
shutdown or thermal alarm options and features no AGP voltage or V-Link voltage
readings. 
Generally
however this is a good BIOS that seems to still need a bit of reworking and has
some good upper ranges that in the wrong hands will kill a perfectly good system. | 
