MSI woos consumers with onboard SoundBlaster Audigy SE found on their K8N Diamond Plus motherboard

INTRODUCTION

Over the years MSI have always produced top quality motherboards for the masses. Their motherboards are among the most feature packed on the market. They are in direct competition against some of the big manufactuers out there ... including Asus and Gigabyte. What makes MSI so different and appealing to consumers is the fact that they usually bundle loads of extras with their products. Often, these include free retail software, extra cabling and their own hardware monitoring software. They really seem to know how to package and market their products ... just take a look at the K8N Diamond Plus motherboard and you'll see what I mean. It has "BUY ME " written all over it. I'm not surprised, since the the K8N Diamond Plus motherboard also features an onboard SoundBlaster Audigy SE, dual gigabit ethernet, 10 USB ports (yes! 10 USB connections).

For the average user, MSI motherboards offers everything you'll need to get a fully working system up-and-running, with both performance and stability to match. However, if you ask any enthusiast ... "which motherboard would you really go for? " ... MSI, unfortunately would not be on their list. Some overclockers would shy away from MSI motherboards because of the limited voltage adjustments for CPU and DDR, and this is one of the reasons why so many MSI boards needed voltage mods. You might be asking ... why do you need to increase the voltages? Well, if you are overclocking, voltage increases for CPU and DDR are needed for stability.

Although many enthusiasts do not regard MSI motherboards as their ideal overclocking board ... they have come a long way since the early Athlon XP days. To change all of that ... MSI have introduced many innovative features on their motherboard range including their Live Update, DOT and the patented "CORE CELL" in the BIOS. The Core Cell is an advanced BIOS feature which allows users to manually adjust a host of BIOS options including adjustments for memory timings, multipliers, FSB, CPU and DDR voltages. Even better is their new DOT Express (Dynamic Overclocking Tool) feature allow users to safely overclock without having to worry about system stability. All these BIOS features are ideal for any enthusiast who want to get best out of their system. More information can be found on MSI's website.

The K8N Diamond Plus motherboard is based on Nvidia's NForce4 SLI chipset and offers SLIx16 functionality, as well as a host of other features. It caters for all AMD socket-939 processors upto Athlon FX-60 (dual core) with ram running upto DDR400 ram. With so much talk of AM2 + DDR2, this motherboard has the danger of being overshadowed by MSI latest release ... their socket-AM2 based motherboard running DDR2 ram, the K9 series.

However, having said that, right now there's absolutely nothing to worry about. Let me tell you this ... I can honestly say, there's plenty of life left in the socket-939 and DDR combination. The performance of AM2 + DDR2 hasn't been all that impressive, maybe by the end of the this year the manufacturers will sort this issue out. In the meantime ... let's take a closer look at MSI's K8N Diamond Plus motherboard.