BIOS
The BIOS on the K8N SLi Ultra is filled with options and is using the convenient Phoenix Award BIOS.

The first BIOS screen looks like any other and has the following submenus from up to down, left to right: Stand CMOS Features, Advanced BIOS Features, Advanced Chipset Features, Integrated Peripherals, Power Management Setup, PnP/PCI Configurations, H/W monitor, Cell Menu, Load Fail-Safe Defaults, Load Optimized Defaults, BIOS Setting Password, Save & Exit Setup, and finally Exit Without Saving.

In the Standard CMOS features it allows editing of the date, all the drives that are on the IDE and SATA channels, floppy, and halt on errors. Also in this menu it specifically states what CPU is installed, what BIOS version is installed, System Memory, and total memory. The latest consumer BIOS at this time is v3.1 which does not support dual core. However the representative at MSI allowed me to tinker with their beta BIOS that does support dual core, so that is indeed in the works.

Advanced BIOS features contains all the information about boot order and other basic options like floppy seek etc. Nothing out of the ordinary here. There is a sub-menu "Hard Disk Boot Priority" that allows different drives on different channels to boot in a specific order, or add in cards, the raid array etc.

Advanced Chipset features wins the award for least amount of things in a sub-menu. It simply has the System BIOS cacheable option. In the beta revision of the BIOS this submenu is removed, and that option is found under a different tab.

Next is the Integrated Peripherals tab which has IDE Function setup, nVidia RAID Config, Onboard Device, and Onboard I/O Chip Setup. In the IDE Function Setup it has all the IDE channels and SATA channels (except RAID) and allows for enabling and disabling of all of them. On the IDE channels it allows for changes in the UDMA settings on the slave and master drives. The RAID config allows for RAID of IDE or SATA drvies. The Onboard Device contains all the options for the dual NIC's, onboard RAID, and onboard audio. Lastly the I/O Chips Setup has options for other external input/output devices like IR or serial ports.

Next is the Power Management setup that allows changes to be done to boot up power, what the user would like to happen under specific conditions like power loss, or wake up event activities.

The PnP/PCI Configurations submenu has the initial display first setting (PCIE or PCI) and a few IRQ options.

H/W Monitor contains information like the current PC temperature status, Chassis Intrusion detection, etc.

The Cell menu is where the meat and potatoes lie for anyone interested in tweaking or overclocking.

Firstly under the DRAM configuration submenu it allows for CAS changes to the RAM a HT divider, and whether to run 1T, and S/W memory hole remapping. The devider allows the RAM to run asynchronously from anywhere from 100-200 MHz at 100, 120, 133, 140, 150, 166, 180, or 200 respectively.

Under the Cell Menu it allows for dynamic overclocking, changing of the FSB, HT frequency (5, 4, 3, 2.5, 2, 1), HT width (16up/16down, 8up/16down, 16up/8down, 8up/8down), CPU Ratio (in .5 increments), Aggressive Timings, CPU voltage (maximum of 1.450 in .050 increments), Extra CPU voltage (neat option that allows even higher voltage to the CPU by a percent), Memory Voltage (maximum of 2.85 in .05 increments, and NF4 voltage (or strictly speaking HT voltage from 1.5 to 1.85 in .05 increments).

All of the information in the BIOS was generally easy to use and understand and the overclocking features were plentiful. The only things I wish the board allowed was more excessive memory voltage to something like 3.2. The CPU voltage was more than enough when applying Extra CPU voltage, so really I have no major complaints here, in capable hands this board is able to go a long way.

Test System
AMD 3500+ Winchester, MSI K8N Neo4/Sli Platinum (nForce 6.53), 1GB Corsair XMS Xpert, 2x MSI 6600GT not in SLi (71.84 Forceware), 74GB Western Digital Raptor, Windows XP Professional edition w/ SP2 and all updates.

Sound - Subjective Listening
This board has the Creative SoundBlaster Live! 24 bit version sound card on board as opposed to an envy24 bit solution or the now discontinued and beloved Soundstorm. When working with the system I've gone thorough 1000's of songs and tons of CD's (I've had a lot of time to work with the board). Through my electronica collection like Hybrid and Rob D, New Wave like Depeche Mode and The Cure, Industrial Nine Inch Nails, and Stabbing Westward, and even Classical like Chopin and Bach there was no audible popping or clicking at all what-so-ever. However the Soundblaster live series of cards, even this 24bit version is based off of very old hardware, and it's lackluster in features like new variations of EAX, but for onboard sound it's good enough.

Sound performance - Comanche 4 Demo
I used Comanche 4 which is a CPU intensive benchmark as opposed to a Video card intensive benchmark for this test.

As you can see there was approximately 6% difference in speed between with sound and without sound. This is significant, and other onboard sound solutions that would only eat up from 3-5% would have been much better.

IDE and SATA channel performance

HD Tach 3.0.1.0
IDE	124.4 MB/sec, 4% CPU
SATA	118.9 MB/sec, 5% CPU

The actual speed of the harddrives aren't too important as that is hard drive dependant. The CPU utilization is much more important, and as this shows I got 4 and 5 percent respetively. Not too bad.

Benchmarks:
3D Mark 2001 SE
Aquamark
dbpowerAMP Music Converter
Comanche 4
Doom 3
PCmark 04
Sisoft Sandra 2005 memory Bandwidth Benchmark
SYSmark 2004
TMPGEnc Plus
Unreal Tournament 2004

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