MSI K8N Diamond SLI (nForce4 SLI) Motherboard Review

We recently took a look at MSI’s non-SLI nForce4 board (the Platinum Edition) and were quite impressed by it. We ended the article saying that we’re very much looking forward to the Diamond Edition of this board with SLI capabilities and that’s exactly what we have with us today. Diamonds are traditionally a girls best friend but this MSI board is surely a boy’s toy. Lets play.

…To summarize- the K8N Diamond comes packaged nicely and has a decent layout with the exception of a couple of minor annoyances. It has a great set of features such as Creative’s onboard sound solution and the inclusion of WiFi and BT although we would’ve liked to see a higher-end Silicon Image controller with RAID 5 capabilities such as the one used in the Platinum Edition of this board. And while we don’t see many PCI-E x1 add-on cards, MSI should’ve added at least one of these slots.

The BIOS offers reasonable amount of tweaking options and overclocking is good with us reaching 300MHz FSB. The performance of the board with a single card is about as good any other high-end nForce4 board although it lagged slightly behind the Gigabyte SLI board in certain benchmarks when setup in an SLI mode. We really have to upgrade our 400W PSU to be sure about SLI stability at higher resolution but other than that, the board ran very stable.

Comparing the MSI to the Gigabyte SLI board, we think both have their advantages with MSI bundling Bluetooth and Creative onboard audio while Gigabyte offering RAID5 and PCI x1 slots. The MSI seemed slightly faster with a single card while Gigabyte seemed to perform faster in an SLI mode. Stability was same on both the boards although the MSI diamond did overclock better and in our opinion, looks better with its black PCB.

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MSI K8N Diamond SLI Review