MSI Eclipse Plus Review

MSI has certainly delivered a great board with the Eclipse Plus, overclocking my i7 to 4GHz was fairly easy although with base clock frequencies past 200 some moderate tweaking had to be done, I even managed to get a CPU-Z at 4.5GHz. If an overclock fails, the motherboard must restart three times to clear - an annoyance but with the clear CMOS button near the PS/2 ports users can easily reset the BIOS and continue overclocking. The BIOS has plenty of options, and worked without a hitch minus a small glitch that I overcame with some work and CMOS clearing, but was likely due to (possibly unstable) overclocking runs. The memory voltage was being loaded at 1.2V rather than 1.6V, and a few other anomalies. Memory support only goes up to 1333MHz, with 1600MHz being possible through overclocking although higher is possible - it worked fine in testing although XMP support may have had a tiny bit of trouble. MSI finally solidified the color scheme to black and blue, removing the heinous copper heat sinks that stood out like sore thumbs and alternatively used matching heat sinks with metal casings with MSI's logos and created a much more serious looking board!