by Doors4ever
10/27/2008 | 09:29 PM
Personal computers have been out there for dozens of years, however, we always see the same blue-white screen of the Base Input/Output System (BIOS) on system boot-up. The commencing PC users usually get lost in the numerous strange settings. Even an experienced sysadmin may not always explain what this or that parameter actually stands for. Therefore, it is natural that many developers out there have already been thinking of ways to simplify and ease the first-time system configuration process. Intel Corporation set the precedent, as always. Besides, the 64-bit Itanium processors developed at that time had to be incompatible with the previous-generation of 32-bit CPUs, so why not replace the outdated BIOS with something more contemporary and more convenient to work with? This is ho EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface) came into this world.
They started working on it back in the 90s. In early 2000 they talked a lot about this innovation at the Intel Developer Forum and showcased first systems run by EFI. And then things got real quiet. In fact, there are a lot of examples of how numerous useful innovations do not get the support from the community and sink into oblivion, even if the initiative comes from such a significant company as Intel. So, I doubt that we would have remembered about EFI if it hadn’t been for MSI. They announced that their three new mainboards on Intel P45 Express chipset will support MSI Click BIOS based on UEFI specifications. It turned out that Unified EFI Forum (UEFI) has taken over Intel’s development, so its name eventually changed.
We have already tested MSI P45 Platinum mainboard, but at that time, it didn’t yet support Click BIOS. Now we decided to get it back to the test lab in order to check out the new functionality.
Since no one knows how UEFI BIOS should actually look like, let’s imagine what we would expect from a BIOS like that. It would be nice to have this BIOS not only in English but also in your own native language with explanations for all the parameters in it. We would definitely want to be able to use not only keyboard but also the mouse. We wish it were not blue and white, or yellow and black but beautiful. It should have a number of useful utilities available without loading the bulky operating system. And of course, it should have the functionality of the “traditional” BIOS plus a few cool extras.
I may have forgotten something very important here, so, please feel free to add in the comments section to this article. And in the meanwhile let’s check out what the UEFI BIOS is like in the form of MSI Click BIOS.
In fact, it turned out not so simple to start our first experience with MSI Click BIOS. If you got to MSI web-site page devoted to MSI P45 Platinum mainboard or any other mainboard supporting MSI Click BIOS, you will see no mention of it anywhere. There is nothing about it on the page with different BIOS downloads for this board, either. It turned out that you have to go to homepage of the English-language Taiwanese site where you have to locate a small 150x60 pixels banner leading to a separate section on the site discussing Click BIOS. Only here you can read about the features of UEFI BIOS, download the BIOS version and a CD disk image with additional software called MSI Extras Disc.
Reflashing the new BIOS is not that simple, too. MSI mainboards do not have a built-in utility with graphics interface for updating the BIOS. You will not be able to use Windows Live Update either. You must create a boot-up USB Flash Disc, copy BIOS file and Msiflash.exe from the same archive to it. The uncompressed BIOS is over 4MB big, so you won’t be able to use a floppy disc. When you start the system, press F11 during POST to get access to the boot-up menu and select the flash drive as your boot-up device. Boot the system, type “msiflash [filename] /p”, wait for the update to go through and reboot the system. You will have to repeat this succession of actions if you decide to go back from UEFI to the regular BIOS. Pretty complicated, don’t you think so?
UEFI BIOS may make it easier for the beginner to get acquainted with the board, but this complicated reflashing process may scare him away. In fact, there are quite a few ways of making BIOS updating easy. For Intel mainboards you can download a self-extracting archive with the BIOS and launch it right from Windows. You will be offered to reboot and the BIOS will get automatically updated. EVGA offers to download an image file with the BIOS to be saved on a CD disc. The BIOS is updated automatically, just select the correct boot-up device. abit offers several bat-files with the reflashing utility name, BIOS file name and all corresponding keys already in them. It is much easier to type START or RUNME and then follow the system’s instructions, you are less likely to make a mistake than in case you have to type msiflash E7512ims.107 /p or something like that.
Overall, we hope that BIOS reflashing will soon become simpler. If you are not discouraged by these complications or are experienced enough not to find it difficult at all, then you will be able to successfully accomplish the BIOS updating process. After that, press F2 or Del to enter Click BIOS.
The name itself, Click BIOS, should have prompted you that besides the keyboard it will also allow you to use your mouse. The mouse support is very conveniently implemented: left click – select, right click – cancel or exit. If you roll the mouse pointer over the section icons they get animated, so everything looks very colorful, just the music is missing here :) However, at first let’s take advantage of one more Click BIOS feature, namely, select the interface language:
I have to admit that I got pretty ambiguous impression from this feature. On the one hand, it is much easier to learn some unfamiliar parameters when they are names and explained in your native tongue. On the other hand, there were a few serious flaws in terms translation, so that we had to switch the language back to English in order to figure out what certain things meant. Thos who are already familiar with the BIOS parameters are certainly more used to the English names for them.
Let’s start with the OC section, which stands for OverClocking, as you may have already guessed.
This section contains the full list of overclocking-related parameters. We can change frequencies, timings and voltages. Too high voltages will be highlighted red. At first glance it looks exactly like the Cell Menu section from the “traditional” BIOS Setup of MSI P45 Platinum mainboard. However, if you take a closer look at it, you will notice a few differences, which may sometimes be quite significant. For example, processor Vcore adjustment:
As you can notice, the minimal increment is 0.051V, which is way too big for a contemporary CPU. It has to be at least half the size - 0.025V, or even quarter the size – 0.0125V. By the way, many contemporary mainboards offer real fine tuning and use 8 times smaller increment of only 0.00625V!
Setting section contains other BIOS parameters and consists of several sub-sections:
System Status is not similar to PC Health Status, as I have thought at first, but something in-between CMOS Features and System Information from the “traditional” BIOS Setup.
H/W Monitor page is located in the next sub-section called Chipset Setting together with other pages with pretty familiar names from the traditional BIOS Setup:
Password Setting page allows creating user and administrator passwords. Boot Setting page will help set the order of boot-up devices and other corresponding options.
By the way, there is one new device among the boot-up devices: Built-in UEFI Shell. At first I mistakenly assumed that it is automatic access to the UEFI BIOS that allowed using the built-in applications. However, it turned out that in this case we get an invitation “Shell>” and a blinking cursor indicator like the one in DOS or Command Prompt in Windows. Too bad there is no description of available commands. I could display the list of supported commands using “help”, but failed to figure out how to look through them page by page.
Save & Exit section seems to be pretty clear by the name. Note that you can save user settings in a profile. Unfortunately, you can only create one profile.
ECO section looks very much like MSI GreenPower Center utility, however, in terms of available settings it is closer to GreenPower section from the “traditional” BIOS Setup of MSI P45 Platinum mainboard. We can select the number of active phases in the voltage regulator circuitry of the processor, memory or chipset North Bridge, or let the mainboard do its on its own depending on the current workload.
Utility section includes a few tools: Live Update, Flash BIOS, HDD Backup and Boot Screen.
Flash BIOS utility seems to be the most useful of them.
Set the ROM size, which is 4MB in our case, and find the preliminarily downloaded BIOS update file on one of the drives. “Open” icon will open the file manager for you:
Once you click “Flash BIOS” icon, the BIOS will be updated. I didn’t check the way “Erase” icon works fearing that the board may fail on me before I complete the review.
Boot Screen Utility allows setting the user image in BMP or JPG format with the help of a similar file manager. This image will be displayed on system boot-up.
And when you click Live Update, the system will ask you to insert a previously created UEFI CD disc into the drive. The MSI web-site page devoted to MSI Click BIOS has a Download page where you can get not only the new BIOS update, but also an image of a compact disc with software and tools called MSI Extras Disc. This archive is about 45MB big and when you extract the files it will expand to about 100MB, which need to be burnt onto a CD disc.
I personally didn’t like Live Update utility. Once you launch it, you get the following message:
I waited a moment. Then another moment, thinking it could be poor connection to Taiwan. Then I just went to take care of a few things. When I got back, the screen was dark. Moving the mouse didn’t bring it back to life. Pressing space bar didn’t help either. It turned out that this was exactly what needed to be done for the utility to start looking for updates and all this time was simply wasted. And would you have guessed that you need to press Enter or space bar for it to actually start working?
I believe that it should have terminated or closed the program, don’t you think so? Anyway, but after waiting for another moment (which really was a moment this time), I got the following message:
In fact, I had the latest version 1.07 reflashed already, so this utility can’t really detect the correct BIOS version and updating it may be a waste of time again. You can exit this utility only by rebooting the system.
By the way, which word do you think was highlighted on the previous screenshot: “Reboot” or “Go”? I thought it was “Reboot”, because it was of different color. In fact, the word “Go” was highlighted, and “Reboot” shadowed and inactive. It is not very illustrative, IMHO. But this exact same highlighting is used in the entire Click BIOS. For example, on the next screenshot the word “Yes” is highlighted, and not the word “No”:
HDD Backup utility allows saving an image of any hard disk drive partition on another HDD or in another partition. You can restore the data also very easily. The only drawback here is that this utility will only work with partitions formatted in FAT, FAT32 and NTFS.
The “Games” section is frankly a disappointment. There are only three games that are also on the Extras CD disc: Puppy Run, Pair Match and Break-Out.
Puppy Run is a sort of Digger, Snake or similar games: the puppy has to eat bonuses and avoid enemies. Pair Match also has nothing original about itself: you get a quick glance at a set of cards and then have to find all pairs as quickly as you can. Break-Out is arcanoid. These are all very popular and well-known game types, but they are all made in a pretty primitive manner, so they will hardly be of any interest to anyone. So, why do we need them? By the way, there is one more game on the disc called BangBang, but for some reason it is not displayed in the menu.
That’s about it. We have discussed all the functions of MSI Click BIOS. Windows Vista OS loaded just fine, but the processor clock frequency multiplier and Vcore didn’t get lower in idle mode. Processor power-saving technologies didn’t work for some reason, although they were enabled in the BIOS. At this point we completed our work in MSI Click BIOS. Luckily, we didn’t have to repeat the same complicated routine with USB flash drives and typing in long command lines. It was really great to see Flash BIOS get us back to the “traditional” BIOS in no time.
UEFI BIOS is theoretically a very convenient way of learning about the BIOS functionality, changing the parameters, launching several applications without booting the operating system. However, MSI Click BIOS is currently quite raw and is not ready yet for fully-functional use. Reflashing it is still too complicated for a beginner, translation issues may be pretty confusing even for an experienced user, there are quite a few upsetting problems that need to be fixed. We were especially upset to find only one really useful utility: Flash BIOS. As you can see, the MSI Extras DISC is Linux based:
Why didn’t they include any browser, instant messenger, music and video players or chats? MSI web-site claims that all these are going to be added in the near future:
Moreover, MSI is going to involve experienced users into tools development, so there will definitely be much more useful tools available to you one day, but not yet.
Remember what we expected from a UEFI BIOS in the beginning of this article? Let’s see how well our expectations are met in MSI Click BIOS. Yes, they did provide interface in several languages, even with brief comments, however, it is sometimes incorrect and confusing. Mouse works perfectly fine, no problems here. As to the aesthetics of the interface, tastes differ, so we won’t comment on that part here. Flash BIOS is unfortunately the only really useful tool built in. Click BIOS has limited functionality of a traditional BISO and is not bug-free yet.
At first we were going to perform a short test session and try overclocking a CPU, but we gave up this idea because even in nominal mode the processor wasn’t working the way it was supposed to. Of course, you have to draw the conclusions yourselves, but I think at this time MSI Click BIOS is just a pretty toy to play with. It can give us an idea on what we could expect in the near future, but after that it is better to go back to the good old blue-and-white BIOS without mouse, graphics, or sound, but with richer functionality and fewer problems.