The BIOS
The K8N Neo4 Platinum/SLI's BIOS implementation is a perfect example of how motherboards with nearly identical BIOS capabilities and features can deliver vastly different experiences. At first glance, the Neo4's BIOS looks pretty good—but the more time I spent with the board, the more problems, quirks, and omissions I found. Some of them are detailed below, while those that deal specifically with overclocking are covered later in the review.

We've started with a basic shot to show where the various areas of BIOS control are. MSI's design splits overclocking control and hardware monitoring into two areas: Cell Menu and H/W Monitoring, respectively. Other than that, the menus are laid out in the standard Phoenix-AwardBIOS configuration. We'll start with the Cell Menu, since MSI's tweaking and overclocking options are reasonably strong, when they work.

The Cell Menu offers all sorts of options, including a High Performance Mode setting that can be toggled between Manual (the default) and Optimized modes. Unfortunately, neither the BIOS nor manual make any mention of the difference between these two modes. As far as we can tell, High Performance Mode sets the board's Dynamic Overclocking level to "Sergeant" (a 3% CPU overclock), and changes the CPU VID from a startup value of 1.30V to 1.35V. There's more going on behind the scenes, and we'll elaborate in the overclocking section a little later in the review.

In addition to a cryptic High Performance Mode setting, the K8N Neo4's BIOS also has a poorly explained Aggressive Timing switch. The motherboard manual states only that "This item allows you to enable or disable the memory clock. When [Enabled] is selected, the timing delay of memory will be shorten to increase the performance." We measured memory latencies with this option enabled and disabled, with the following results:

When Aggressive Timing was disabled (the default setting), RAM timings were 2-2-2-5 with a Bank Cycle Time (Trc) of 11 and a DRAM Idle Timer of 16. When enabled, standard memory timings remained at 2-2-2-5, but Trc dropped from 11 clocks to 7, while the DRAM Idle Timer rose from 16 cycles to 256. Lower latencies tend to equal faster performance, but the DRAM Idle Timer is usually an exception. This setting refers to the maximum amount of time a memory page can be left open before the memory controller issues a pre-charge command. Leaving pages open longer can improve performance in cases where the memory controller issues another request for data from that page before the idle timer expires. Server performance is the one area where a higher DRAM Idle Timer may lower performance; the frequent random accesses in certain server workloads benefit most from a short DRAM Idle Timer.

If you have high-quality RAM, enabling Aggressive Timing shouldn't cause a problem. We tested multiple sets of PC3200 rated for 2-2-2-5 latencies and saw no issues.

The K8N Neo4's BIOS offers several dynamic overclocking options, each named after a military rank. We'll discuss this feature more in our overclocking section, but there's one oddity I wanted to mention now. We've already discussed how setting the High Performance Mode field to Enabled activates Dynamic Overclocking at Sergeant level (3%) while simultaneously raising CPU voltage from 1.30 to 1.35v on our Athlon 64 X2 4800+. Strangely, however, the voltage increase is only applied when High Performance Mode is activated. Manually setting the Dynamic Overclocking setting to Sergeant doesn't raise the CPU VID.

While some of the Neo4's BIOS settings are confusing, the BIOS does offer a standard array of memory timing options. The Neo4 Platinum/SLI doesn't use a 1T command rate by default (the Aggressive Timing switch doesn't affect this setting, either), so be sure to check the "1T/2T Memory Timing" switch when tweaking your memory.

The Neo4 Platinum/SLI's H/W Monitor screen provides basic voltage, fan speed, and temperature information, but that's it. The BIOS's only nod toward fan control is the Smart CPU Fan Target setting, which lets users select the temperature at which the system's CPU fan will begin to speed up. Unfortunately, the fan speed ramping wasn't aggressive enough to keep our Athlon 64 X2 4800+ from crashing under load, even with a 40C temperature target. MSI will have to offer lower CPU temperature targets or more aggressive fan speed ramping to make the feature useful.