MSI K9N Diamond

Verdict: Good features and good value for money

MSI's Diamond series of motherboards use only high-end chipsets, and are generally treated to an overabundance of other goodies too, so we were looking forward to testing the K9N Diamond.

The K9N Diamond is based on the nForce 590 SLI chipset, which means that it has two 16x PCI-E slots and supports SLI. The two high-speed PCI-E slots are spaced well apart, with the two 1x PCI-E slots in between them. In addition, there are two PCI slots.

One common use for a PCI slot is a sound card, although, as the K9N Diamond has a Sound Blaster Audigy SE sound chip on-board, there's less need to upgrade. The Sound Blaster Audigy SE provides 8-channel sound and EAX support, although an X-Fi would be better for modern games.

The K9N Diamond has an interesting cooling arrangement; a heatpipe links the Southbridge to the Northbridge, which in turn is cooled by a 40mm fan mounted vertically over a large copper heatsink. A generous ten USB 2 port is provided, along with two FireWire ports, and MSI also bundles a rounded EIDE cable. There are six RAID-capable S-ATA II ports, plus a single EIDE port.

Our sample K9N Diamond had an early, pre-production BIOS but, even so, it had the ability to increase the vcore to 1.65V, plus 23.3 per cent of the VID (the CPU's standard voltage), and send 2.3V to the RAM and 1.5V to the Northbridge. This allowed us to overclock the FSB of our test Athlon 64 X2 CPU from 200MHz to 255MHz, which is slightly lower than most of the other nForce 590 SLI motherboards, but still a good overclock. However, by dropping the CPU multiplier from 11 to 5, we were able to increase the FSB all the way up to 325MHz, which is the second-highest frequency achieved by any Socket AM2 motherboard in this test.

The K9N Diamond may not have been able to overclock our test CPU by as much as the Asus Crosshair and Abit Fatal1ty AN9 32X, but it's much cheaper, and it's the only Socket AM2 motherboard with proper hardware-accelerated audio. As such, it's definitely worth considering.