MSI meets the demands of the enthusiasts with the P6N Diamond motherboard. 

INTRODUCTION

I remember during early years of 2000, there were just a few chipset manufacturers for the home PC market. These included VIA, SIS and of course Intel. Back then, SIS specialised in producing a lot of mainstream and integrated chipsets designed for the all-in-one solution, while VIA and Intel were producing high performance chipsets for the mainstream and enthusiast market.

Over the years, Nvidia and AMD-ATI have also entered this business of producing motherboard chipsets ... with surprising success. Both companies have now established themselves as one of the brand names to go for, when it comes to performance chipsets. Just take a look at some of the enthusiast's motherboards on the market, and you'll find most of them are equipped with either Nvidia's NForce or ATI's Xpress (Crossfire) chipsets. 

Unfortunately over the past few years, VIA have sharply reduced the production of their high performance chipsets. Like SIS, they now concentrate on producing the all-in-one solution chipset, with integrated graphics and sound for the mainstream and industrial markets. Sadly, in this industry, you need to adapt, and adapt quickly ... the enthusaist market is the most ferocious.

       

In one of our previous MSI reviews, we've taken a look at their P6N Platinum motherboard, which used NForce 650i chipset. We found the performance to be very good, and even match some of the enthusiast motherboards out there. In this review, we'll be taking a look at MSI's P6N Diamond motherboard, which uses Nvidia's NForce 680i SLI chipset and is aimed at the enthusiast market. It's one of MSI's high-end motherboards, which comes under the "Diamond" range, and it supports all Intel processors (socket-775) all the way upto, and including Intel's Core 2 Quad. It boasts a wealth of features too long to list. These include onboard Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi sound, 4 x PCIe (x16) slots, silent heat-pipe cooling and MSI's Dual CoreCell.

       

MSI have always produced good quality motherboards which are usually feature packed, and I've like the extra goodies they bundle with it. Just to name a few ... these include backplates for firewire and USB, lots of SATA power and data cales, additional chipset fan and flexiable SLI bridge cable. I also find MSI motherboards through personal experience to be solid and stable, which is why a lot of mainstream users like them. Hassle free and easy to setp up.

Featuring onboard Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi sound, heat-pipe chipset cooling, MSI's Dual CoreCell feature, D.O.T. overclocking and solid capacitors ... the P6N Diamond certainly has a lot to offer. But can the nForce 650i SLI chipset onboard give the mainstream and performance users what they want?

With some many manufacturers now producing their new motherboards to support Intel's Core 2 Duo/Quad processors, can MSI make this motherboard the choice of the enthusiast?

OK, let's not waste anymore time, and take a closer look at MSI's P6N Diamond motherboard ...