MSI uses the Award BIOS for all their motherboards and the 850 Pro5 is no different, however there aren't as many tweaks as we're use to seeing. There still are the usual AGP options and CPU tweaks, but maybe we've been spoiled by AMD based motherboards for too long...

Here we can adjust the RDRAM frequency from 400 MHz (default) to 300 MHz but that's it. There are no CAS Latency adjustments. Then again, this is RDRAM.

We have a few AGP options as well; the motherboard assumes you're using a 4x AGP videocard (since it has the 1.5 V AGP lock) and 4x is enabled by default.

At least there are the usual overclocking options available. If you're lucky enough to have a unlocked Pentium 4 you can change your multiplier to whatever you'd like. You can add up to 0.100V to the voltage of the processor and the 850 Pro5 even allows you to adjust the FSB from 1 MHz at a time between 100 MHz-200 MHz!

I personally would like to see memory voltage tweaks as standard components to a BIOS.

Overclocking:

As for overclocking the MSI 850 Pro5 was up to the task. Using a Pentium 4 2 GHz Williamette we were able to push it to 113 MHz FSB which gave us a CPU speed of 2.26 GHz, quite an accomplishment considering we're using a Willaimette! Another nice thing was that the MSI 850 Pro5 could do 112 MHz while keeping the RDRAM running with the 400 MHz option enabled!