Hi guys,
I've got an MSI 6714 mobo. It boots up with an award BIOS, which has
hardly any options on it, yet the manual says I should have the whole
shooting match ... looking at he chip it says "Phoenix BIOS d686".
Would I be right in guessing that this is the chip make & model, and
it just happens to have an Award BIOS in it ?
Should I worry about the fact the BIOS seems a little lite, and just
accept my PC is running and leae it at that /.
Is this a retail board or one with an OEM bios? If an OEM,
that would explain it.
As Paul mentioned you could copy down the bios string to do
more research, possibly flashing a newer bios.
On the other hand it is a pretty basic board and so long as
the system runs ok and you don't have need to change
anything you can't access (like memory allocated to
integrated video if applicable, or to disable some feature
if using an add-on card for something like GbE or audio),
then I wouldn't worry too much about missing bios features
especially today, since tweaking to get some performance
won't matter much relative to newer parts, though the one
thing most important to most users might be having bios
settings available to set boot devices, boot priority, and
enabling ability to boot emulated USB drives, flash
thumbdrives, etc., or USB keyboard support if that is
disabled.
IOW, the real question is if you need to change something
you can't. You could always get the latest bios you can
find and note if there are any seemingly important bugs
fixed, archiving that bios away until when you might need
it. I don't recall how long MSI keeps files for legacy
systems these days, many companies tend not to keep each for
a set number of years but rather do a cleaning-out of a lot
of old stuff all at once, sometimes cutting off owners
completely and other times just making it harder to find the
files in a legacy parts link or having to peruse an FTP site
somewhere.
