MSI K8N Diamond Plus - Guide to my first week

Question

OK, not a newb here, but been around the block quite a bit.   MSI K8N Diamond Plus is my 5th A64 mobo (ECS K8M800, my daily undestroyed computer, K8T800, my 12 year olds gamer, Asus A8V Deluxe, first 939 system, Abit AN8 SLI, first SLI gamer, and now the MSI Diamond Plus).   Had the KDP (K8N Diamond Plus) for more than a week now, and here's what I've learned.
This is state of the art again, and we have no one to blame but ourselves for the pain this causes us when we upgrade like lunatics 
And as usual, the drivers and BIOS are al Dente (i.e. not cooked enought yet, a little raw)
MSI is also oddly silent on this system, which is wierd, as they are a large company, and specifically cater to enthusiasts.  But their BIOS guys are MIA.  Hopefully this will not be forever.  Asus, ABIT, DFI, Epox are always fast with fixes
The board is a nice design, with everything basically accessible, as much as any other board.   Lots of purposeful components, not too many dumb frills.  No tooty fruity colors, but rather practical parts.
The new 2 piece NForce chipset is fine, and the MSI guys gave us a decent, but funky cooler.  It gets a little warm to the touch when you pound on it with Prime95, or Quake4, but other than that it is fine
The manual has a zillion typos, and fortunately for us in this forum, we have shared what we've learned.  The translation from Chinese to English leaves quite a bit to be desired, and hopefully, MSI will learn from Asus and Abit and get a better translation service.  In 2006 this is just plain stupid, especially with a $225 board   
As usual, the mobo supplied tweaker utilities are just aweful.  They look like a hallucination from a Hunter S Thompson book, and they work about as well.  Core center is a sad state of affairs, and the rest of them just burrow their way into your otherwise stable system and cause it to have poor behavior.  And therefore as usual, the BIOS is the best way, if slowest, to tweak this bundle of parts
Which brings us to the BIOS.  IMHO, the worst one I've seen on a high end board.  ZERO explanation for half the settings (this is not strange in and of itself, BIOS is still a black art, but in a tweakers board, we should have some basic explanation  )
There seem to be adequate settings in the BIOS for all sorts of doodads and gizmos, but who the heck knows what half of them are.  Roger points out rightfully, that we now need to "Tune" across all these different intermediary bus structures and test.  But with the lack of info from either NVidia, MSI or anyone else for that matter, its kinda hard to know where to start.
The board is clearly sensitive, which is a result of it being high strung.  This is no different than any "first out" product I've ever bought.  Most take 2 or 3 turns of the crank to get totally stable and forgiving.  This one hated my OCZ platinum EL 2Gb kit memory, and it brought out the worst in one of the SLI based EVGA 7800 GT COs.   These components worked in the Abit AN8 SLI (although not always great), but the MSI has ZERO tolerance for even the slightest pertubation from the memory.  It was BSOD city until I removed both of these components by process of elimination that took probably 100 hours
Once I removed the bad components, and replaced the memory with Geil Ultra X 2x512 2-2-2-5, it worked great, ran Prime95 for 10 hours with no errors, and seems reasonably stable.  I've RMA-d the bad 7800GT CO back to EVGA, and will report back on how SLI behaves when I get the new one (cross shipped of course, I haveno patience )
I also now need to replace the 2Gb RAM kit with something that the board will tolerate.  I may RMA the 2Gb kit back to OCZ and try another one, but I dunno.   I love OCZ but I have a bad feeling about this, even though they have great!!! support.  I may try OCZ PC4000 or the RAM that Roger successfully used.
I did upgrade to the 1.16 BIOS, and found that some new things were added, as well as voltage control in Cell was a little better, but registration of changes in voltage is still a disaster.   I adjusted a bunch of times, it didn't register, and I ended up smoking a new A64 3700+ Diego with 1.95 volts, even though the BIOS claimed it was 1.53.  I had to rebot to see what was going on.   The Thermalright XP-90 kept the proc from melting down through the earth
Finally, I hope this board attracts more people, and therefore more tweakers that can figure out all these gadgets and settings.  Everyone flocked to the Asus X16 SLI product, which is too bad, as this one needs lots o' folks to hack it up for us to figure out what is going on.
The on board Creative audio sounds lousy to my ears, and I will replace it with an Audigy 2ZS gamer that I had in the Abit.  It just sounds better, but hopefully the drivers will not trash my newly stable system.   Creative scares me, they scare me alot.
I've been able to get the CPU up to 2.4Ghz, with a .5 volt bump to the CPU and 2.9 volts into the Geil memory.  So far, so stable, no smoke coming out yet 
I hope this info is somewhat valuable to someone on this board.  I will post details of all changes that I make, as others are doing, so we can at least take care of ourselves with this thing.

Answer 1

Quote from: nanohead on 15-February-06, 01:17:10
Which brings us to the BIOS.  IMHO, the worst one I've seen on a high end board.  ZERO explanation for half the settings (this is not strange in and of itself, BIOS is still a black art, but in a tweakers board, we should have some basic explanation  )
There seem to be adequate settings in the BIOS for all sorts of doodads and gizmos, but who the heck knows what half of them are.  Roger points out rightfully, that we now need to "Tune" across all these different intermediary bus structures and test.  But with the lack of info from either NVidia, MSI or anyone else for that matter, its kinda hard to know where to start.
first of all, i do think that all the settings in the BIOS have an explanation in the manual, even if it's a basic one. if that explanation doesn't tell you everything in detail, is because if you do need a detailed explanation of the settings, you probably shouldn't be messing around with those settings.
Quote from: nanohead on 15-February-06, 01:17:10
I did upgrade to the 1.16 BIOS, and found that some new things were added, as well as voltage control in Cell was a little better, but registration of changes in voltage is still a disaster.   I adjusted a bunch of times, it didn't register, and I ended up smoking a new A64 3700+ Diego with 1.95 volts, even though the BIOS claimed it was 1.53.  I had to rebot to see what was going on.   The Thermalright XP-90 kept the proc from melting down through the earth.
wanna tell me how did you get 1.95V on that mobo?
Quote from: nanohead on 15-February-06, 01:17:10
I've been able to get the CPU up to 2.4Ghz, with a .5 volt bump to the CPU and 2.9 volts into the Geil memory.  So far, so stable, no smoke coming out yet 
a 0.5V  bump? again, you must be joking. maybe 0.05V.