Published: February 7, 2009 | Source: MSI | Author: Tom Koflach

MSI’s EFI BIOS

Test Setup

For testing, an MSI P45D3 Platinum was used, which is currently the only available board that uses the EFI technology. The board came packaged like a standard motherboard and upon first appearances looks no different.

As you can see, the board MSI sent looks very nice; let’s hope that EFI is just as impressive. Here is a full specification of the test system used:

Intel Celeron 430 1.8GHz,
2GB Corsair Dominator DDR3 @ 1333MHz,
HIS Radeon 4830 512MB,
Intel Stock Cooler,
Hiper 730w PSU,
LG DVD RW Drive,
Samsung 245B 24″ Screen.

We decided to go for a fairly low-end system to see how EFI performed. With all the extra graphics it could have an effect on system responsiveness in the firmware and using a slower CPU + Ram should make the effect far more noticeable. An optical drive was used as MSI bundled a disc with some additional EFI applications. The disk included games and back-up software, which were obviously too big to fit onto the motherboard itself, so they could only be accessed with the disc inserted.

For those of you who already have an MSI P45D3 Platinum or one of the other supported boards (click here), you can download the EFI firmware and flash it to your motherboard. To see how easy this was, we tried to simulate it on our board following the process which MSI show on their site here. However, despite our best efforts and a number of flash drive re-formats, we simply couldn’t get it to work. Whether this was just a combination of our test board and flash drive, we don’t know, but flashing your board certainly isn’t for the fainthearted.