Power-Consumption:
With Greenpower enabled the board does shine.
Please note that other configurations may yield other results.
Conclusion:
Pushing an unfinished product on the market is never a good move. The board was on sale in early June and it took MSI one month to release a BIOS that would enable a decent overclock.
Most annoyingly MSI decided to disable the energy-savings per default, which is one of the more odd things to do, especially considering MSI's marketing department advertises this feature around the world in important magazines and on the biggest websites. On the other hand, they incorporated some insane voltage settings which for sure will ruin your board and your memory. Besides some BIOS engineers are still in the 90ties where S1 was an accomplishment, but we expect any board to run with S3 settings without trouble. Enabling features such as COM1 which is not on the back-panel or slot-bracket is a waste of resources. We all know, the less resources Windows has to handle the more stable it gets.
The board is a decent product, but it's no overclocker's dream. It seems HQ is putting all effort in their DDR3 line which we will come out soon. DDR3 has become cheaper in the last months but still is twice as expensive compared to DDR2 and does not offer any significant speed improvements. High overclocking 2GB DDR3 memory kit still cost about €180,- while you can get 4GB DDR2 memory kit for about €60,-.
While our discussion with MSI improved their layout which is nearly perfect now, the BIOS is still in need of much more improvement. We would like to see energy savings enabled by default, voltages limited so it will not damage your board and settings enabled/disabled which do make sense. We also think the board was not designed to be an overclockers dream, MSI putting all effort to their DDR3-line, but giving you enough headroom to get decent overclocking and performance.
This board is now available for about €137,- and if you have some knowledge of the BIOS and settings you can buy it without thinking, otherwise you should consider alternatives.