MSI K8N Diamond Plus Motherboard

[MikeC]

Steve Angelly has completed his review of MSI's K8N Diamond Plus Motherboard.

http://www.nvnews.net/images/logos/msi_diamond_plus_logo.gif


Nice job as usual. :)

You can read the review here (http://www.nvnews.net/reviews/msi_k8n_diamond_plus/index.shtml)

[jAkUp]

Excellent review! Nice looking mobo too ;)

[Mr_LoL]

Good review. I quite like this motherboards is it has a decent sound chip on board. I wonder What the sound quality is like?

[Superfly]

im leaning towards MSI for my next build, I've found ASUS and Abit have really gone down the pan recently.

[Rytr]

Good review. I quite like this motherboards is it has a decent sound chip on board. I wonder What the sound quality is like?

Sound quality is at the ear of the beholder. :D Honestly, it is difficult to convey sound quality as my perception may be different than yours. What I can say is that it is Creative's CA0106 chip as shown in the review. Performance is on par with any of the Sound Blaster Live! 24-bit add-on cards.
I was hoping MSI would get Creative to supply them with a later model of the SoundBlaster chip for this board but that is not the case. There is an increase in SNR which is an improvement but still I cannot tell much of a difference over the same basic chip on the P4N when hooked up to my Klipsch 4.1's or 2.1's. Nonetheless, the bottom-line is that the sound is very good and provides noticeable improvement over other on-board sound solutions that I have, or heard.
It is excellent with my Kinyo 5.1 headphones in gaming sessions. ;)

[Monolyth]

This is a very nice and very stable mobo. I've had it for about 5 weeks now. I was dissapointed with a less-than-stellar A8N32-SLI that frequently hard locked and just ran very poorly. Maybe a bad board, but Asus in my eyes was king for a long time and provide quality parts, now my praise has shifted to MSI, heck I even bought 2 MSI 7900GTX's :D Once again nice and stable.

The O/C options are not as advanced as say the DFI, but I'm not that advanced anyway ;) It runs what I need it to run no questions asked.

[Rytr]

I think I am going to like this board. The Intel version I have is very good. Neither will clock with the LanParty UT UT NF4 SLI-DR Expert but both will overclock to acceptable speeds depending on the processor and ram.
I did not put the overclock results in as I did not achieve the level of some of the reviews on the net. Once I got to 300MHz that was about it and I look for stability with performance above everything else. Plus, I like to run the ram at its lowest latency at 1:1 and not have to drop the multiplier or reduce HTT. I may change but that is just me for now.

[Clay]

Nice review, lots of great info as usual! :thumbsup:

[mike2h]

thx for a great review! if it wasnt for am2 coming out pretty soon i think this would be my upgrade board.

[superklye]

Fantastic review, Steve! Great work! :)

[Xion X2]

I've had this board for about a month now, and it's extremely stable and running at a 1200mhz bus. System crashes are basically non-existent, even with my system moderately overclocked.

Very happy with it.

[Rytr]

That is good to hear! Thanks for letting me know.

I had some concerns when I first got the board with the original bios. MSI was very quick, however, to come out with an updated bios at the time of the review. It has been nothing but solid and I have run a 3700+ SanDiego as well as the X2 4200+, at least 3 different brands of HDDs, and 4 different sets of ram with no problems. I have ran a 7800 GTX, 6800 GS's in SLI, and the 7900 GT without any problems in the most stressing games up to and including Oblivion. It is one fine motherboard in my opinion.

Whoa! I just noticed in your sig you have the 7950 GX2. :)