Wow, I guess my theory about MSI getting an exclusive Award BIOS
was wrong. The SR7-8X uses the same Award BIOS that MSI has been using since
their KT266Pro2-Ru. We still have all the usual tweaks we've become accustomed
to it's just laid out a little differently.
Here in the DRAM control, we have all the memory tweaks we would
expect out of an Abit motherboard. CAS Latency, RAS Precharge and RAS to CAS
Delay.
There aren't that many AGP tweaks available.
As you can see, Soft Menu III is still here albeit modified from
what we're use to. FSB can be tweaked from 100-200 MHz in 1 MHz increments,
there are a whole load FSB/Memory/AGP/PCI Ratio's to play with. If you don't
want your peripherals to run out of spec you can always specify the speed they
will run at. You can adjust the Vcore to +15% and the DDR voltage up to
2.8V.
One thing we were surprised about is about was the conservative
voltage adjustments. After all, many other motherboard manufacturers (Shuttle,
Soltek, Epox, Asus) usually give users higher options when it comes to voltage
adjustments. Why hasn't Abit? It makes things much simpler having not to voltage
mod the motherboard.