MSI K7N2 (MS-6570) Motherboard

Company: Microstar International
Product: MS-6570 K7N2 AMD Motherboard
Street Price: ~$100 USD
Date Reviewed: March 10, 2003
Reviewed By: Joey C. aka Chong345
Overall Rating: (8.2/10)

BIOS and Overclocking:

The MSI K7N2 uses the Phoenix – AwardBIOS. The BIOS has all the typical options like PC Health Status, hard drive and floppy settings, etc. Let us get into the overclocking material. Going into the Advanced Chipset features there are options for changing the FSB, memory timings, and FSB/DRAM Ratio. These are the key options in this section of the BIOS for the overclockers. The user has the ability to adjust the FSB in 1 MHz increments from 100-200. Maxing out at 200 FSB is not bad but we feel that higher options could have been added since other motherboards are providing over 200+. The memory timings give the user full control over the memory’s performance. Also the FSB:DRAM ratio is nice for people who want to run the memory asynchronous from the Front Side Bus. However most of the time, better performance is gained when running the FSB and DRAM synchronous or 1:1.

In the Frequency/Voltage Control menu, there are options available for adjusting the voltages for the CPU and DRAM. For the CPU the voltages can go from 1.55 to 1.8V. The DRAM voltages go from 2.5 to 2.7. We feel that these options are not enough for the intermediate or hardcore overclocker. Most of us know that these Athlon XP’s are power hungry and require a lot of voltage when running at the faster speeds. The memory voltage options could also go a little higher to help obtain higher memory clocks. There are no VDD controls so the user cannot change the voltage going to the chipset. The other main option in this menu is the CPU ratio that provides many different multiplier options. The BIOS has multiplier ranging from 7-13. This helps especially when overclocking since it allows the memory to run higher since the CPU is not bottlenecking the system.

When we actually tried overclocking this motherboard, it was difficult. The multiplier options would not work for us with the stock BIOS or the latest on MSI’s website. This was interesting because we have read a numerous places that this particular motherboard does unlock all thoroughbred b processors. We tried an XP2400 and a XP2800 and neither allowed us to change the multiplier. Without multiplier options we were very limited to the speeds we could run due to our CPU overheating. We did however manage to get the FSB up to 185 in dual channel mode using all the maxed out voltages and with the memory set to SPD values. This was not the best overclocking experience but since reports state that this board does in fact unlock multipliers, maybe ours was 1 out of a million that it does not work on. So to say the least, our overclocking experience was cut short.