MSI’s EFI BIOS
EFI Testing
Once the system was built, we used the on-board power button to fire up the board. Entering the firmware is the same as a standard BIOS, and after a press of the ‘DEL’ key we were brought into the menu.
This is the home screen. On the right hand side you have a drop-down menu for selecting your preferred language, and the five buttons in the middle are for selecting the sub-menus. The sub-menus are: OC, Game, ECO, Setting and Utility.
First off we have the OC page, which has all of the features an overclocker would be familiar with. The layout is similar to a standard BIOS except you can use your mouse to navigate. Clicking a setting will bring up a list of options (similar to a standard BIOS).
Next up we have ‘ECO’. This has all of the voltages you could possibly need listed, as well as CPU Power Consumption and PWM Efficiency. The data is all laid out very nicely and is clearly set out into groups. An interesting feature is the CPU Power Consumption – something to cringe at when overclocking.
Here we can see our test chip was reported as using a measly 12W’s. Overclocking would certainly raise this value considerably. Additionally, there is also a 12V, 5V and 3.3V box-out. Our guess is that this is for the power draw of attached devices, although it didn’t seem to display any values throughout our testing.
Here we have the Settings sub-menu. This contains all the less exciting stuff contained within the BIOS. You can setup passwords, change boot settings and view system status from within this menu. Clicking Chipset Setting brings up a fairly large list of settings with which you can tinker.
The settings contained within are probably best left to the more advanced users, as some of it could potentially cause quite a lot of head scratching if used incorrectly.
Next up we have the Utility menu and this is where you can edit and update the firmware, all within a fairly friendly environment. BIOS Update was the most disappointing, where clicking this simply took you to an update console rather than staying within the nice GUI. Hard Drive Back-Up does as the name implies – it backs up the hard disk to another. Flash BIOS is the same as a standard BIOS and allows you to update a BIOS you have already downloaded. Finally we have Boot Screen…
This utility allows you to customize the boot screen that is displayed when the board boots up. You can select from either Bitmap or JPEG images. These will need to be accessible to the fimrware, from a flash drive or similar.
