MSI K8N Diamond (US: K8N NEO) NVIDIA nForce4 SLI Motherboard Review

Among the three major motherboard vendors who have released their first wave of NVIDIA nForce4 SLI motherboards, the MSI K8N Diamond was the first to arrive in our labs and has made quite an impression upon us. Believe it or not, this is perhaps the first quad LAN motherboard – dual Gigabit LAN ports, 802.11G Wireless LAN and Bluetooth for personal area networking. It is also one of the first motherboards to have support for six SATA II ports that is courtesy of both the nForce4 SLI MCP and the Silicon Image SiI3132 SATA II controller integrated on the board. Yet another terrific plus point of the MSI K8N Diamond is its Creative Sound Blaster Live! 24-bit audio subsystem that is quite a departure from the usual Realtek and C-Media audio codec chips. You can expect better audio quality and lower CPU utilization thanks to the dedicated audio hardware. Furthermore, there are enough USB and Firewire ports to last you for eternity (or thereabout).

…Assessing all the attributes of the motherboard, we have to emphasize that the MSI K8N Diamond has unparalleled features and is an excellent all-round performer. Other noteworthy traits are its decent overclocking stint with plenty of parameters in the BIOS to tweak performance, Dynamic Overclocking Technology and Active MOS 2 amongst a few others. With an overwhelming number of plus points, we were hard pressed to give it full marks but it was less than perfect without PCIe x1 slots. Nevertheless, we awarded it our 4.5 stars award and our Most Innovative Product Award for its excellent feature set.

HardwareZone
MSI K8N Diamond (NVIDIA nForce4 SLI) Review