MSI 845PE Max2-FIR (845PE)

MSI 845PE Max2-FIR: BIOS and Overclocking

A fairly common BIOS among most modern-day motherboards today, the MSI 845PE Max2-FIR uses the AMI BIOS.

There's a good amount of information embedded in the PC Health section of this AMI BIOS.

You'll find readings on CPU temperature, system temperature, fan speeds, Vcore, PSU readings (all rails), and even Battery voltage. This amount of info is about the norm as far as PC Health sections and Hardware Monitors are concerned. One odd thing we noticed with the PC Health readings was that it consistently reported our 2.26GHz CPU as running about 47-50C. This was odd because nearly every Pentium 4 motherboard we've used have reported a CPU temperature no higher than 43C in the BIOS, with as low as 33C being reported by a select few motherboards. This says something about the accuracy of reading temperatures from the Pentium 4's on-die thermal diode.

There were not a whole lot of options available in the Advanced Chipset Features section of the BIOS, which is normal for most MSI Pentium 4 motherboards.

You're only able to adjust CAS Latency, Precharge to Active, Active to Precharge, Active to CMD, and Burst Length (Burst Length isn't too important though). We would have loved to have seen some Bank Interleave, Command Rate, or DRAM timing mode adjustments. However, it seems the vast majority of motherboard makers simply aren't including these three additional options for their 845PE motherboards for one reason or another.

What's most disappointing about the BIOS tweaking that comes with this board is the lack of any adjustable memory dividers in any shape or form. You're limited to just DDR266 or DDR333 despite how high you may overclock your FSB. We would have liked to have seen if this board could reach 400MHz memory clock, but that doesn't seem like it's going to happen in any future BIOS revision. There were no onboard jumpers or switches that could have changed the BIOS settings with this motherboard either.

There were some pretty decent voltage adjustments in this particular BIOS. VDIMM options went as high as 2.8V in 0.1V increments. This should be plenty for most memory overclockers, even despite the fact that overvolting memory doesn't yield too much better of a memory overclock to begin with. VAGP was very good too, being adjustable as high as 1.8V. This won't disappoint too many video card overclockers, but like VDIMM and memory, it's not all that necessary to raise VAGP to get a good video card overclock.

Vcore is adjustable as high as 1.80V in .025V increments, though in actuality you will only get as high as 1.76V-1.78V max, as default Vcore (as read through the PC Health section) fluctuates between 1.45-1.48V. However, this isn't too much of a limitation, as running over 1.7V using regular retail air cooling for a long time isn't advisable anyway.

Just like every 845PE-based motherboard we've tested in the past, the MSI 845PE Max2-FIR comes with an independent AGP/PCI lock running at 66.67MHz/33.33MHz. This feature has played a key part in allowing numerous 845 users to overclock their FSB to very high speeds. As should be common knowledge by now, running your AGP or PCI cards too far out of spec can damage those parts.

MSI's 845PE wasn't disappointing at all as far as FSB overclocking was concerned. The following table lists the components we used for overclocking the FSB using the MSI 845PE Max2-FIR motherboard:

With this very conservative overclocking setup we were able to go "only" as high as 160MHz FSB, or just over 2.70GHz core clock. Again, this type of overclock is not out of the ordinary for 845 motherboards, especially 845PE motherboards. As we said in our previous 845PE review (AOpen AX4PE Max) expect your overclocks to average between 160MHz-166MHz using our FSB Overclocking Testbed. Of course, that would assume you get CPU that overclocks at least as good as ours does.

Just like AOpen's AX4PE Max motherboard, the MSI 845PE Max2-FIR lacks memory flexibility (or overclocking) options in the BIOS. All in all, the Max2-FIR ends up being only a mediocre DDR333 performer…