Installation

No problems with installation. There was plenty of room around the processor socket, and I was able to fit our large Gigabyte Volar CPU cooler. One thing I noticed, is that the motherboard only features an extra 4-pin power connector for the CPU, rather than the usual 8-pin power connector found on most Intel based motherboards.

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What I did find a little akward was the location of the 3-pin power connector for the CPU fan. It's really close to the DDR2 DIMM slots. And because the motherboard has 4 PCIe slots, there's not a lot of space between the Circu-Pipe chipet cooler and the graphics card ... if you use the first PCIe slot.

Test Setup

Procedures

In our tests we used the motherboard's standard BIOS settings first. ALL settings were set to default (AUTO) for maximum compatibility. Memory clock was set to DDR2-1066 with the memory timings was set by SPD. We also used the latest video, audio and chipset drivers. Dual channel memory mode was enabled using OCZ DDR2-1066 PC2-8500 2Gb Kit.

Here's a list of software/games we used for benchmarking. In all the gaming benchmarks we used a resolution of 1024x768 with maximum settings turned on (x4 AA and x16 AF)

 - CPUZ 
 - Science Mark 2
 - PC Mark 05
 - 3D Mark 2005
 - 3D Mark 2006
 - F.E.A.R. (DX9)
 - Call of Juarez (DX10)
 - Crysis (DX10)

Windows Vista with native DX10 was used as our operating system.

For overclocking, we manually adjusted various BIOS settings including ram timings, FSB, CPU and DDR voltages. (Please see article index: Overclocking)

The BIOS

The BIOS was easy to use. Here, you can adjust various options including CPU frequencies, FSB, and of course voltages for memory, chipset and processor itself. Memory timings can also be adjusted.

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The BIOS uses MSI's D.O.T. overclocking feature, it's easy to use however, we prefer to manually overclock. So we decided to manually set the options for CPU multiplier, frequency, FSB, DDR3 frequency and voltages to get the maximum overclock.