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MSI K8N Diamond Plus

While not the first board to hit the streets using the nForce 4 SLI X16 chipset, MSI brings out their own feature rich enthusiast board to compete for your hard earned cash. Just how does the K8N Diamond Plus fair against the competition?

Introduction

MSI Micro Star International Co. Ltd. was founded in 1986 and since then they've branched out into many markets including VGA cards and notebooks and other electronic items. However, motherboards are their bread and butter and have always been a favorite among PC performance enthusiasts and OEMS alike. Years ago they really made a name for themselves by producing some of the best Athlon Socket A boards around and have continued to make excellent products year after year.

The MSI K8N Diamond Plus is MSI's first AMD motherboard to be based on the NVIDIA NForce 4 SLI X16 chipset. The K8N Diamond Plus supports all current socket 939 processors including the AMD Athlon 64, AMD Athlon FX, AMD Athlon 64 X2, and AMD Sempron processors. The board supports full speed dual x16 PCI-Express graphics slots, memory up to DDR 400MHz speeds officially. Following industry trends, the K8N Diamond Plus requires only a few additional components for a full system. Components needed include a socket 939 CPU, DDR1 memory, a PCI Express x16 video card, drives, and 24 pin power supply. MSI integrated the following components into the K8N Diamond Plus's design: 2 IDE ATA-133 ports; 1 floppy port; 2 SATA2 ports on the Silicon Image controller (On SATA 5 and SATA 6 Ports); 4 SATA2 ports supported by nForce 4 SLI controller (On SATA ports 1, 2, 3, 4); 10 USB 2.0 capable ports (4 in rear panel, and 3 on board headers supporting 2 ports each); 2 IEEE1394a Firewire ports (via motherboard headers): 2 Marvell Gigabit Ethernet ports on the rear panel: Creative Labs Audigy SE 7-Channel Codec, Coaxial / Optical S/PDIF out ports on back I/O; and of course, standard PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports.

Main Specifications Overview:

Detailed Motherboard Specs:

Packaging

The MSI K8N Diamond Plus has a simple and elegant package. It is blue and has bluish/silver accents. The words Diamond Edition are centered on the box front. To the top left is the MSI Core cell logo and below that is MSI's feature list. BuzzFree, LifePro, PowerPro, and Speedster are all listed in that top left corner. At the bottom of the box is the board's model number and just above that text is the chipset and below the model number the box states that the motherboard was designed for Socket 939 AMD Athlon 64/FX/X2 processors. The box front also proudly displays a heat-pipe design logo and the MSI logo is right in the top left above that. On the back of the box is the NVIDIA SLI logo and a picture of the motherboard itself, and a warning about power requirements directly below the motherboard picture. Also on the back under the SLI logo is the Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy SE and EAX HD logos. All the legal information rounds out the box at the very bottom of the boards back. MSI has included the following components inside the package with the motherboard; Quick User's Guide, Driver CD's, 2 RAID driver floppies, round floppy and ATA-133 cables, 4 SATA cables, 2 SATA power cables, IEEE1394 bracket, MSI's D-Bracket cable, and the standard ATX I/O shield. The ATX I/O Shield has holes for the motherboard's PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports, SPDIF out, fiber-optic out port, 5 mini-headphone jacks, IEEE1394, two RJ-45 network ports, and finally one legacy serial and parallel port.

Board Layout

The K8N Diamond Plus has almost a perfect layout. I really can hardly find any fault with the layout at all. The DIMM sockets, CPU area, the SATA ports, and especially the slot configuration are great. Honestly this is probably one of the best laid out motherboards of all time. I was seriously impressed with it. Still, as always, there is one downside to this design and that is the fact that the Northbridge is sandwiched between the CPU area and the top PCI-Express x16 slot. Which means that should you desire to replace the heat-pipe solution with something else, clearances in that area could become tricky. Additionally, the orientation of the fan that is attached to the heat-pipe cooler over the Northbridge is pretty odd. The way it is positioned, airflow to the chipset fan can be obstructed easily by larger CPU coolers. I am also pleased to see that MSI provided an x4 and 2 x1 PCIe slots in addition to the x16 slots. This is particularly useful in workstation type scenarios where a high end SCSI or SATA controller card will need to be installed with a pair of NVIDIA Quadro cards. The bottom PCI slot is at the bottom of the board and has a PCIe x4 slot between it and the bottom video card slot. This is excellent as installation of a add in sound board will be a snap. Well done on all counts MSI.

The CPU area is open and clear of obstructions. Only the most ridiculous of CPU cooling solutions could possibly be problematic here. I did think the 8 pin 12v power connector was a bit close to the CPU socket, but it didn't cause me any difficulties when installing the huge Alpha cooler onto the CPU. One thing I do need to mention here is that when I installed my Alpha cooler I had to remove the existing AMD standard mounting hardware, as is customary for high performance or excessively large air cooling solutions. Unfortunately MSI in all of their wisdom glued the back plate down to the board. I had an extremely difficult time removing the stock AMD mounting hardware to mount this board. ASUS has done the same thing with the A8R32-MVP Deluxe and the A8N32-SLI Deluxe, however the glue was easy to break lose and the old mounting hardware came off easily. Not the case with the MSI board. I was VERY surprised that I didn't damage the board during removal of the stock AMD mounting hardware.

The board's 4 DDR1 DIMM slots are located below the CPU area, as is fairly typical of AMD motherboards today. They are in an alternating color coded orientation. No space was left in between banks or slots. While this isn't a critical problem, I prefer to see them split into two groups of two. The ATX 24 pin power connector is just in front of the memory sockets, as is pretty standard these days. There is plenty of clearance here and the cable is high enough on the board to keep cable routing neat. The extra 4 pin Molex connection for SLI operation is just behind the Northbridge and is nicely out of the way. Though I would prefer manufacturers start placing them on the boards edges near the top of the board to keep them further tucked out of the way.

The Northbridge is located just to the left of the CPU socket. The Northbridge is cooled by a kind of hybrid heat-pipe and active fan solution. The Southbridge is cooled by a flat passive heat sink which is also part of the heat-pipe solution. Neatly placed in front of the Southbridge are all the SATA 3G ports laid out in a single row.

The K8N Diamond Plus has 2 PCI-Express x16 slots, not just mechanically x16 form factor, but each slot has full x16 lanes worth of bandwidth. The board has 2 PCIe x1 slots, 1 PCIe x4 slot, and finally one legacy PCI slot that is colored orange.

The K8N Diamond Plus includes the following ports on the rear I/O panel: 4 USB ports, 1 IEEE1394 port, 2 RJ-45 ports, 5 mini-headphone jacks for audio, 1 optical out, 1 SPDIF connector, as well as the usual legacy Parallel, serial and PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports.