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- Date:
- Monday , June 07, 2010
- Author:
- Daniel Dobrowolski
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
MSI X58 PRO-E Motherboard Review
We take a look at another offering from MSI. Think of this one as a budget oriented X58 board that's pretty much all business. It brings SLI and CrossfireX support to a more mainstream price point. The board's packaging sports a "Gaming Series" logo on it which is a telltale sign of who they are targeting with this product.
BIOS
The X58 PRO-E uses the American Megatrends Inc. BIOS or AMI BIOS for short. BIOS version 8.A (dated 3/09/2010) was used for all screen shots and general testing.
The BIOS for the X58 PRO-E is what you'd expect for a board of this type. Everything is laid out in the basic DOS menu style format. Everything is listed by category.
The standard CMOS features screen contains basic hard disk configuration options and the time and date settings. Additionally there is a sub-menus for "system information" which simply contains BIOS information and CPU information as well as the amount of installed memory. The advanced BIOS features menu contains settings for the full screen logo display, quick booting, num-lock LED behavior, MPS table version etc. Additionally it contains sub-menus for the CPU feature, chipset features, boot sequence and trusted computing.
The CPU Feature menu contains settings pertaining to CPU performance and features such as Hyperthreading, Execute Disable Bit, C1E, Overspeed protection and Virtualization technology. The chipset feature submenus only contains the HPET setting. Integrated peripherals contains settings for your integrated components. RAID Controllers, LAN ports, IEEE1394, and audio are all controlled from here. You can enable or disable these devices or change their configuration as needed. There are some additional sub-menus for doing this as well, specifically pertaining to the RAID controllers. Power Management of course contains ACPI settings and standby or resume from power failure settings.
The "Green Power" menu contains the power saving features. This controls your CPU phases and onboard LEDs. The hardware monitor contains PC health information such as temperatures and voltages. You can also control fan speeds from here for the onboard headers.
The Cell Menu is where we get down to business. Here is where all your performance settings are and where you'll spend the majority of your "tweak time" with the board. As you can see a host of settings and information is represented here. There are also additional submenus which are accessible from the main Cell Menu. Most importantly, your base clock, QPI settings, voltages, memory profiles, uncore settings, and memory ratios can be adjusted from the main Cell Menu. Among the many submenus are the QPI and Memory-Z menus. The QPI submenu allows for tweaking of the QPI link speed and frequency settings. Memory-Z allows you to view the individual SPD tables for each installed memory module. You may also view the XMP memory tables from there.
The Advanced DRAM Configuration submenu allows you to adjust your memory timings. When switched from auto to manual mode more options than most people would want to look at appear. Like most X58 boards the X58 PRO-E has tons of options for enhancing your memory performance. Next we have the Clockgen timer menu. Here you can set CPU amplitude control and clock skew settings. The user settings menu allows for the saving and loading of BIOS profiles. Finally we have the "M-Flash" menu. This menu allows to write protect your BIIOS from being flashed, or backup your BIOS to a file.