Official MSI P7N Diamond (780i) Discussion/Review/Overclock/Guide/BIOS Thread

[loonym]

Here's a new bios file A7510NMS.123 date July 30. I haven't tried this yet but I will this afternoon.

First impression, I like it. Here's what I do when I flash. I reboot and set optimal defaults in bios before flashing. Then I flash and clr cmos. The reason I immediately like this bios, after I cleared the cmos I set my boot order and all the numbers in cell menu and memory subsection that I know work for my q6600@3.6ghz, hit F10 to save and the board quickly posts and goes to windows. I could not do this with 1.22. I had to bit by bit move towards my overclock and one wrong setting would result in no post, that's why I never liked 122. I've only just flashed this 123 bios so first impressions is all I have but if there is anything, good or bad, I'll update. Too bad there are never release notes with these betas. I suspect it is a cpu support update.

[Fiskbit]

Well, I might grab 1.2B3 later due to your glowing review, loonym. Good to hear it's a good release.

I got a reboot earlier with only 1 video card and no sound card, so I'm back with SLI and sound now. I followed Wolf's suggestion of running 1333 FSB. My current settings are as follows:

FSB - 1333
RAM - 666
PCI-e - 105
NBv - 1.3v
CPU GTL - 0.83v
FSB Term - 1.225

All other settings are auto. I had a lot of reboots, freezes, and a blue screen at first while I was fiddling with settings, but then one time it worked just fine. I noticed my video card profile hadn't been loaded, so everything was still running at stock. I loaded the profile manually and immediately got a reboot. I figured out that the reboots that I get right when Windows boots up are apparently caused by loading the profile. If anyone has any idea why that might be, I'd love to here it. I went back to my previous settings and disabled the auto profile loading and had no trouble booting up after that. I tried overclocking my cards to the same settings as the profile manually and didn't have a reboot. I find this very strange.

Running Prime95 across all 4 cores right now and everything looks good. Load temperatures are 51-56 for the cores, and the two motherboard temps reported by SpeedFan are 40 and 46.

I'm mostly curious as to whether my settings look okay. I get the impression that nothing's gonna be burning up and voltage isn't too high, but I'm still not too clear on FSB term and CPU GTL Reference (gonna read more about them shortly).

Also, for those interested, my 3DMark06 score is now up to 15311, which is a gain of a couple thousand from raising my CPU speed 350MHz. I look forward to seeing what I can reach when I've got the CPU and GPUs clocked even higher.