** Official MSI P6N SLI-FI & Platinum NF650i Owners Thread**

ned14

ned14

ned14

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I haven't quite bought my system yet as I'm waiting (like nearly forever now!) for the MSI P6N Platinum to be released in the UK. While the MSI P6N SLI-FI has been out for a while, I think the heatpiping is worth the wait and the extra £25. No other Nvidia 650i chipset motherboard is (currently) of such high quality!

I was hoping to start a discussion on these MSI motherboards as so far it's been lacking in these forums. Other 650i chipset motherboards are well represented in these threads:


Asus P5N-E: http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=17668494 Cost: ~£75

So far, it would appear to be the best 650i motherboard for the money. Reaches high overclocks (> 500 FSB) though needs extra NB cooling, suffers from vdroop but there is a pencil mod and of course has been out since before Christmas, though it has issues with compatibility and has "quirks". It also has no SB heatsink though with good case ventilation, this doesn't appear to be a problem.


Abit Fatal1ty FP-IN9 SLI: http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=17699083 Cost: ~£75

A lot of people seem disappointed with this board. It doesn't overclock as well as the Asus (< 400 FSB) probably due to the smaller NB heatsink and poor thermal contact. It has BIOS issues, POST issues, cooling issues, vdroop issues and other problems. Right now, the Asus is a better buy according to most people. This might change with BIOS revisions.


ECS NF650iSLIT-A: nourl Cost: ~£75

This board slightly resembles what we think the Gigabyte will look like in terms of slots, but comes with a fan on a small NB heatsink and hardwired x8 PCIe slots (so you can't choose one to be x16). Despite the NB fan still has trouble getting above 380 FSB. The Asus is probably still a better buy for this price - bigger NB heatsink for one.


Gigabyte N650SLI-DS4: http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=17696941 Cost: ~£105

This hasn't hit retail in the UK yet, so no one really knows why this board is so expensive when it appears to only offer an extra PCIe 1x over its competitors (both it and the Abit has solid caps). Current lead time is still in the two week region for this motherboard, whereas the P6N Platinum is available globally except for the UK :(


Finally, the motherboards of this post:

MSI P6N SLI-FI: Cost ~£75

MSI%20P6N%20SLI-FLI.jpg


MSI P6N SLI Platinum: Cost ~£100

MSI%20P6N%20SLI%20Platinum.jpg


The SLI-FI has been in retail for some time, and seems to have the same low FSB overclocks (< 400 FSB) and overheating problems without extra NB cooling that all the aforementioned 650i motherboards have.

The Platinum is still yet to become available in the UK though it's been available in the US and Europe for some time now. It has extra heatpiping which according to this review:

http://www.hardwarezone.com/articles/view.php?cid=6&id=2191

... allowed a 440Mhz FSB WITHOUT increasing the NB voltage (which current BIOS revisions hang the machine if you increase above the stock 1.25v).

It seems to me that for the extra £25, this is THE 650i motherboard to get. With the NB voltage problem fixed, it should sail well into the 500's and no need for extra fans, vdroop mods, hacked NB heatsinks or anything else. Well worth £25, and also you get an extra PCI 2.0 slot which for legacy users (eg; me who really needs the two IDE connectors for his old hard drives) is very useful.

I should mention that there is one UK retailer claiming to have the P6N Platinum in stock (hence I know the price). I'm not sure if you're allowed reference competitors to ocuk here though.

So thoughts anyone?

In particular, any links to user experiences with the SLI-FI welcome. It's an identical motherboard, just with extra heatpiping, solid caps and a eSATA port.

I'll be posting my experiences with the Platinum here as soon as it becomes available here in the UK.

Cheers,
Niall
 
Last edited:
More info

Found a forum topic on hardforum about the SLI-FI and Platinum:

http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?p=1030719821

Apparently the SLI-FI can reach ~380 FSB and the Platinum ~440 FSB as per the review. Oh and apparently the Platinum comes with an extra NB fan which you can optionally fit!

One MUST disable C1E in the BIOS to get anywhere at all. This is buried in the BIOS options.

Cheers,
Niall
 
Nickg said:
how can additional "heatpiping" allow higher oc's at lower voltage?

are we saying that ALL 650i boards are contrained by NB heat issues? and that given good cooling they should all hit 400FSB?

or are we saying some boards are simply built BETTER than others and have better cooling which allows them to hit higher FSB's?
Click to expand...

Actually all Northbridges (any chipset) are constrained by heat issues. The size of the heatsink on the NB obviously affects heat dissipation, and a heatpipe will be many, many times better than plain metal at conducting away heat.

There is a reason that 680i motherboards overclock so well, and I think it's because they all have heatpiping.

Cheers,
Niall
 
New Rig Ordered!

The MSI P6N Platinum finally hit UK retail today, so here's what I have ordered. Note that I am upgrading an existing dual 1700 athlon rig which has served me very well since 2001, so I already have some components. All prices are including VAT, and I shopped around so they are indeed low.

I chose the following components after a very great deal of research. Others may find this list useful when building their own (budget) rig.

MSI P6N SLI Platinum NF650i motherboard £98
Intel E4300 Retail £100
Geil Value DDR2 2GB PC6400 Dual Channel Kit 800MHz (5-5-5-15) £106
Seagate Barracude 7200.10 320Gb NCQ £60
Club 3D ATI Radeon X1300PRO Silent Heatpipe 256MB £47
Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro CPU cooler £16.50
Corsair HX Series 520W Modular PSU £67.50

I ordered off three separate vendors because none had all the items in stock and I can only be in the house on certain days of the week, so total P&P came to £7 + £7 + £6 = £20. This annoyed me, but OTOH I got the E4300 and X1300 pro card for a particularly low price so I actually spent effectively only a tenner on total P&P.

Therefore, total cost has come to £515. I had an original budget of £500 to be exceeded no matter what, but I felt the Artic Cooling CPU cooler was too worth it over the stock Intel cooler. In theory, this rig above should overclock the 1.8Ghz E4300 to 3.2Ghz without issue (this runs the memory at its full 800Mhz as it's an FSB 1600 and therefore CPU x8) and if I'm lucky with the part I get, I may even get to 3.6Ghz.

All that said, I have deliberately chosen the parts for a silent PC eg; the Arctic Cooling and PSU will completely stop its fans if it can. I am planning to seriously undervolt the E4300 for much of its usage - my current dual athlon 1700 sucks 228W 24/7 and that costs me around £220 a year with current electricity prices. I reckon I can drop that below 70W which means that this rig pays for itself within four years.

You might wonder about the choices. According to user reports, the Geil memory can be knocked up to 4-4-4-12 if you increase voltage to 2.1v. That wasn't my only reason though - that particular Geil memory is one of the few DDR2-800 memories on the officially tested MSI compatibility list.

The retail Intel was chosen over OEM because user reports off the web suggest that OEM chips are rotten overclockers. Retail currently are getting much better binning apparently.

A lot of people will seriously question my x1300 pro choice. Well, I'm not a gamer - in fact, the main purpose of this new PC is as a GPGPU rig and the x1300 pro is not a bad cheap CTM engine for batch maths processing. When the Nvidia G86 comes out, I'll be getting one of those too for about £50 and then I'll have full support for both ATI's and NVidia's CTM and CUDA GPGPU implementations. Also, this particular ATI card is heatpipe only and therefore is totally silent - this matters a lot to me, as the current dual 1700 athlon rig lives in my bedrom and while I'm used to the loud noise, any women who stay most certainly are not! ;)

Delivery is estimated for next Tuesday or Wednesday. I'll get back to you here by the end of next week.

Cheers,
Niall
 
Nickg said:
but that doesnt explain why 1 board needs 1.2V NB to get 400FSB and why another needs 1.5v+ to obtain the same clock?

surely something massively different there - much more than just cooling.
Click to expand...

There are of course always different behaviours of different chips - hence chip binning. But I think such a large variance is down to one or more of these factors:

* Insufficient power on 12v rail. Even a very good PSU can struggle here.
* Bad air circulation inside case. You'd be surprised what tying up cables out of the way can do eg; my case is actually 5c cooler with the lid on than without - in fact without, my hard drives get very toasty.
* NB heatsink not in proper thermal contact with chip (often manufacturers fault)
* And lastly, poor quality NB heatsink

As an example of that last one, the NB heatsink on the SLI-FI in the picture above is a really nasty heatsink. In fact, shipping models in Europe at least have a far better NB heatsink (with a blue cover) than the one above. Nevertheless, the Asus P5N-E NB heatsink is a monster and I think one of the major reasons for such great overclocks (with additional cooling) from that motherboard.

In the end, the more metal there is in a heatsink, the more heat it can hold and therefore transfer out. That's the great thing about heatpipes - they break that requirement by thermochemically pumping the heat away without requiring simple metal conduction to do it.

This answer your question?

Cheers,
Niall
 
Mista.Gee said:
Just seen an ECS 650i on a competitors site for £75 notes.
Click to expand...

There's a review for that board at http://www.ocworkbench.com/2007/ecs/NF650iSLIT-A/g1.htm.

While it seems to have better cooling (comes with an active fan on the NB), it still can't beat ~380Mhz FSB probably because with the fan they've made the NB heatsink much smaller. I'd tend to avoid it - the Asus or MSI SLI-FI is better, especially with the hardwired x8 PCIe.

Cheers,
Niall
 
Regarding the memory problems, yes if you're running PC2-6400 then you MUST use memories from the official compatibility list (which is in the motherboard manual). One such is Geil Value PC2-6400 and I'm overclocking 2x 1Gb of it flawlessly at 4-4-4-12-18 1T with a slight voltage increase to 1.9v.

This board is picky with memory from what I understand from the reviews. I'm sure it'll improve with BIOS releases.

Niall
 
Overclocking Results!

Ok, lots of good news here! Firstly, I'm running with v1.0 of the BIOS (the one it came with) which is most definitely buggy. One particular bug is the CPU multiplier has no effect, so for my E4300 it's always nine. This meant I couldn't test FSB overclocking. The benchmarks are from Sandra 2007.

At stock: CPU=1800, FSB=800, Mem=400 @ 5-5-5-15 1T, Int=16538, Float=11232, Mem=4500Mb/sec @ 94ns

Simple bump: CPU=3000, FSB=1333, Mem=667 @ 5-5-5-15 1T, Int=27579, Float=18697, Mem=6500Mb/sec @ 80ns. Uses 117W idle 135W busy.

This simple bump was done by setting Unlinked and then FSB to 1333 and Mem to 667 to force a 1:1 instead of 5:6 divider (which is slower). This passed Orthos at five hours. No voltage bumps or anything required, though the BIOS complains about an unsupported CPU.

I then cranked her up bit by bit and got this maximum overclock:

CPU @ 1.4v (+0.1125v)=3375, FSB=1500, Mem=750 @ 4-4-4-12 1T

This yields Int=31047, Float=21061, Mem=7577Mb/sec @ 66ns. Uses 152W busy. This has passed Orthos for an hour (it's still running right now). CPU temp is 40C idle and 52C working.

This CPU limit of 3375 is pretty fixed. It wouldn't even go to 3386 no matter what voltages I applied. For reference, this E4300 has an id of Q641A275 which makes it a week 41 CPU which are known to be good overclockers.

According to anandtech, the new v1.11 bios fixes the cpu multiplier not working bug so after its release, I can tell you how far the fsb will go. For reference, it gets warm but not hot at present.

There are some irritations with the BIOS eg; it doesn't recover well currently from bad overclocks and you need to clear the BIOS most times. Still, not at all bad for a v1.0 BIOS.

Any questions?

Niall
 
Shaolin Chicken said:
Good Work there ned14 with your overclock and also for all the information you have provided for this topic.

I don't know if you already know this, but there is a another bios available at MSI TW.

Here is the link for the 1.1 bios:-
http://www.msi.com.tw/program/support/bios/bos/spt_bos_detail.php?UID=771&kind=1

Let us know how you get on. :)
Click to expand...

I think I said v1.11 is upcoming when I meant v1.22. I'm not sure what v1.1 fixes - according to its own changelog, it IS the initial BIOS release. On that alone I've not reflashed the BIOS.

It's also a real pain to do nowadays without a floppy drive :(. I really wish they'd issue bootable ISO's or something you could burn to a rewritable.

Cheers,
Niall
 
geff_r said:
http://forum.msi.com.tw/index.php?topic=106348.0
useful thread for e4300 owners on this board
Click to expand...

Yeah I'd found that page too. Interesting thing is that my installation at least doesn't recognise any power saving abilities in the E4300 - I assume it's the v1.0 BIOS being unaware of this processor - so the C1E and EIST settings have no effect and Windows is unable to turn off the computer on shut down.

Arse probably will have to upgrade the BIOS now ...

Cheers,
Niall
 
geff_r said:
Companys should release boards that work fine
i'm fed up being a beta tester for hardware.
I've always used software updater for bios never failed me once
but thats's asus.
What cooler do you have on there any idea if a tuniq tower fits?
Click to expand...

See post above for full hardware spec.

Niall
 
Even more good news!

After a great deal of faffing around creating a bootable USB stick, I reflashed my board with the v1.1 BIOS.

And OH WHAT A DIFFERENCE!

Firstly, the cpu multipliers now work, so I could then overclock the FSB to 1600 with only a mild +0.2v (to 1.45v) increase to the NB. The heatpiping makes easy work of the extra heat and I didn't need to use the attachable NB fan. This booted with a multiplier of 8 giving a 3.2Ghz processor with only a vcore increase of +0.1125v.

But then I thought to myself, what about the 9x multiplier yielding 3600Mhz? And well lo & behold, with "only" (heh!) a +0.3250v increase of vcore to 1.6v (accounting for the minimal vdroop) it passes Orthos StressCPU for twenty minutes, though it uses 179W when idle with 55C and a whopping 212W and 81C when in orthos. Indeed I am typing to you right now from this 3.6Ghz monster!

Turning a 1.8Ghz CPU into a 3.6Ghz CPU is a very nice overclock indeed. I could leave orthos run for a few hours, but well I have other things I'd like to do. I also reckon I have a bit more headroom left, could make it to 3.7 or maybe 3.8 but after that on air it's getting very hard ...

In the end, I'm not going to run my PC at that kind of speed for very long anyway. 3200Mhz is good enough for me, it uses only 130W or so when busy which is nearly half my current dual athlon 1700 (which always uses 222W!). Remember in the UK a kWh costs about 10p nowadays, so my dual athlon was costing about £200 a year in electricity being on 24/7. The new computer should halve that cost, paying for itself within four years ...

All in all, this motherboard rocks! You won't find many systems so overclockable for this price!

Cheers,
Niall
 
AFK_Matrix said:
Yeah i know but if it clocks better....
Click to expand...

Thing is, it won't clock better than the Asus could when both are on watercooling. MSI uses tighter internal timings than Asus, so you get a faster machine for a given Megahertz but you can't push the megahertz as far.

For me, I want a machine using less than 100W when idle. I'm not so bothered about overclocking if it exceeds that - also, I want stability above all other else. To double your power consumption for an extra 10% or so of speed isn't worth it for me.

If you're going to remove the heatpiping, you might as well get a SLI-FI and save the £25. Same board without the heatpiping (unless you really like eSATA).

Cheers,
Niall
 
Final overclocking settings

I thought I'd post my final, fully orthosed for six hours, overclocking settings. But first things first, here is my new computer and just how much faster it is than anything else currently officially available. Just to remind you, here is the hardware I bought for £515 in March 2007:

MSI P6N SLI Platinum NF650i motherboard £98
Intel E4300 Retail £100
Geil Value DDR2 2GB PC6400 Dual Channel Kit 800MHz (5-5-5-15) £106
Seagate Barracude 7200.10 320Gb NCQ £60
Club 3D ATI Radeon X1300PRO Silent Heatpipe 256MB £47
Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro CPU cooler £16.50
Corsair HX Series 520W Modular PSU £67.50

BestOverclock.png


Vcore was bumped by +0.05v to be stable at 3.2Ghz. The 650i NB is very nearly stable at FSB 1600 at stock 1.25v, but even at 1.45v it occasionally died after four hours or so of orthos. It appears completely stable at 1.5v, but the heatpiping does become rather hot at this voltage so I added the bundled NB fan but rewired the 12v into the 5v supply instead to lower its RPM from a rather noisy 8000 rpm to a nearly silent 3800 rpm.

I am especially happy with the Geil Value DDR2 2GB PC6400 Dual Channel Kit 800MHz (5-5-5-15) which only cost £106. Overclocking it to 4-3-3-8-16 with only a +0.1v (to 1.9v) addition I think is amazing for such cheap memory. That kind of overclock is normally Micron chips rather than Infineon ...

Lastly, the above configuration uses 102W idle 156W busy. Enabling C2E lowers the idle to 97W but then the bottom multiplier on the E4300 is 6x so there's only so far it can go. The max temperature reached was 53C according to the motherboard and 76C according to Intel's Themal Analysis Tool. I have enabled smart fan for 40C and below, so when idle the machine becomes almost silent.

I may post again with results from the v1.22 BIOS when it comes out. I really hope that this BIOS will allow a 1T command rate as even with looser timings this is faster than tighter 2T timings. Until then, enjoy your MSI P6N motherboard and I hope you found my posts useful!

Cheers,
Niall
 
ned14 said:
I am especially happy with the Geil Value DDR2 2GB PC6400 Dual Channel Kit 800MHz (5-5-5-15) which only cost £106. Overclocking it to 4-3-3-8-16 with only a +0.1v (to 1.9v) addition I think is amazing for such cheap memory. That kind of overclock is normally Micron chips rather than Infineon ...
Click to expand...
You'll never guess what happened last night, or rather early this morning ...

I was trundling along doing stuff at about 7am, and suddenly the machine blue screens. So on reboot I run Orthos and it fails within a minute.

"But this thing ran Orthos without fault for six hours last night?!?!?" I thought ...

But think about it. What's different at night time and day time? Solar radiation. What does solar radiation do? It makes electrical signals noisy!!!

Loosening the timings to 4-4-4-12-16-2T with no voltage change from 1.9v did the trick. Left it bench testing all day today during sunshine. I did think I was being rather lucky before, just goes to show .... nevertheless, still a very respectable overclock for cheap memory.

Sorry for any misrepresentation caused.

Cheers,
Niall
 
WJA96 said:
I don't think it's possible for a BIOS upgrade to allow the RAM to clock 1T rather than 2T as I'm pretty sure that's a function of the RAM specification, rather than the BIOS. It would be good if it could be tweaked in BIOS though.
Click to expand...

Well Anandtech found that the Asus 650i board would allow 800Mhz at 1T but the MSI 650i board needed 2T. From my own testing, mine will do 750Mhz at 1T with no issue but has issue at 800Mhz no matter the voltage. I didn't test it much, but backing off the timings to cas 6 seemed to work but of course that removes the point of using 1T. Ideally, we'd like cas 4 AND 1T like the Asus board.

I'm still considering maybe to bump my multiplier up to 9x and lower memory to 720 to yield 3.24 Ghz. Worse bandwidth but similar latency with 1T. The 1.5v on the NB does concern me slightly.

Cheers,
Niall
 
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