BIOS

BIOS

Standard CMOS Features Menu

Advanced Chipset Features menu

At first glance it would appear that the K7N2 is an ideal overclocking platform. It supports multiplier adjustments, front side bus frequency modifications, and customizable voltages. A closer look reveals somewhat conservative settings though. The front side bus can be set between 100 and 200MHz, in 1MHz increments. Many enthusiasts have hit 200MHz by lowering their processor’s multiplier, so the 200MHz ceiling may be a limitation to some. Processor voltage adjustments are available between 1.55 and 1.8V, AGP voltages are between 1.5 and 1.7V, and memory bus adjustments fall between 2.5 and 2.7V.

Onboard Devices Menu

Advanced BIOS Features Menu

PC Health Status Menu

The nForce2 chipset is designed to run a synchronous front side and memory bus. While it supports DDR400 speeds, we’ve confirmed that the timing advantages of DDR333 far outweigh the theoretical benefits of the faster memory grade. MSI includes several options for tuning the memory bus within the synchronous operation, be it DDR333 or DDR266. If you’d rather fiddle with asynchronous settings, there are predefined, selectable FSB/DRAM ratio combinations. In order to avoid overclocking the AGP bus alongside the front side bus, MSI has decoupled the two pipelines, allowing the AGP bus to be set between 66 and 120MHz.

Tweaking the FSB/Memory bus ratio

Overclocking

We’ve been unable to get more than 2322MHz from our engineering sample Athlon XP 2800+, so we were unable to run any front side bus above 173MHz with any semblance of stability, even with the help of a Thermalright SLK-800 heat sink and an 80mm Vantec Tornado.