MSi 970A SLI Krait Edition Motherboard Review

BIOS and Overclocking

In recent months, all of MSi’s BIOS pages have been exactly the same apart from the personalization to each board type. The Krait Edition is white and black and to the unknowing consumer, could lead them to believe that their video output is broken.

Entering the Settings tab opens up the motherboard settings. Contained within are the usual settings you would expect to see from this section of the motherboard.

The Overclocking (OC) section opens up a vast amount of settings related to overclocking your system. A very in-depth, yet simple approach to what is normally a complicated process.

M-Flash is unique to MSi, although other manufacturers have their specific versions. This allows you to flash the BIOS from an applicable USB drive and USB port.

Onto the second column to Overclock Profiles. If you are like me, I like to have a different number of profiles for my system to run at; be it general work, gaming or even under-clocked states for acting as a media centre.

Into the Hardware Monitor, this gives you a visual look into what the system is doing. You can adjust the fans through drag and drop settings on the chart, monitor the voltage from the PSU and even system temperatures.

Finally, we have the Board Explorer. This is a relatively new tool to the world of enthusiast technology, allowing you to see what is plugged in and to where. On this particular version, it tells you the CPU make and model if you hover over the CPU socket.

Overclocking 

AMD make overclocking a pain, you can only choose from preset values with no detailed tweaking like on Intel chips. Here I managed to attain an overclock of 4.7GHz