Athlon64 Motherboards: First Look at Chaintech, FIC, and MSI

MSI K8T Neo: BIOS and Overclocking

MSI uses AMI BIOS on the K8T Neo, but the look and feel of the BIOS options in this AMI BIOS are almost exactly like a Phoenix-Award BIOS. A full range of overclocking options are available, including adjustable CPU voltage, memory voltage, and AGP voltage. A full range of memory timings are available, including the ability to set CAS 2, 2.5, or 3.0 timings. Memory Timings worked well. We could find no option at all in the MSI BIOS to set AGP/PCI lock, which will become a very important option since we cannot set CPU multipliers on Athlon64. We contacted MSI, who told us this will be included in an upcoming BIOS upgrade. Other than the missing and critical AGP/PCI lock, the rest of the BIOS offered a full range of options for tweaking the system for best performance.

As with other tested Athlon64 boards, we did not find a provision for multiplier adjustments in the K8T Neo BIOS. This makes the AGP/PCI lock particularly important, since high settings of the FSB will be the only available means of overclocking — the same as what we currently see on the Pentium 4 chips.

FSB Overclocking Results

Without a PCI/AGP lock in the pre-release BIOS, we made no serious attempt to overclock the K8-800T. We did find that we could boot with reasonable stability at a maximum setting of 219 using either an IDE or a SATA hard drive connected to the VIA SATA controller. This is quite different from Intel SATA, where SATA must be set at 200 or the system will not boot. We will explore this important subject of overclocking the MSI K8T Neo in our upcoming Athlon64 motherboard roundup. We are looking for more answers regarding PCI/AGP lock on VIA K8T800, since VIA has not offered the PCI/AGP lock option on recent VIA chipsets.