Work and Performance in Nominal Mode

We didn’t experience any difficulties during assembly of our MSI Eclipse Plus based system. We also encountered no problems during work in nominal mode, the board acted exactly like many other mainboards. The processor clock frequency multiplier and core voltage went down in idle mode; under heavy load the clock multiplier increased to 21 and rarely to 22 thanks to Turbo Boost technology. The memory worked at 1067MHz with 8-8-8-19-1T timings by default. Many mainboards report the current CPU clock frequency during system boot-up. However, we haven’t yet seen any mainboard that would display the frequency correctly taking into account working Turbo Boost technology. We really liked that MSI board did it.

Since MSI Eclipse Plus behaved just as many other systems we tested, we suggest proceeding to the performance benchmarks results. We are going to compare the performance of our today’s hero, MSI Eclipse Plus, against the last mainboard we reviewed – Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD4P. The mainboards set almost all parameters themselves, and as we have expected, their performance numbers differed minimally.

You may have noticed that on the box as well as the back of the mainboard itself there are stickers with MSI Eclipse Plus name printed on them and “013” numbers written by hand. It is probably the number of the board sample that we received for review. There was also a sheet with the same number on it with the benchmark results for this particular board, the system configuration, date and time when the tests were taken as well as signatures of people performing and controlling the testing.

I doubt that a sheet like that will be part of every mass production bundle, but it was very interesting to check it out. For example, we noticed that with beta BIOS versions the memory worked at 1333MHz in optimized mode, while with release BIOS versions the frequency was set at standard 1067MHz.