It has been a while since we tested our last AMD based board. Although this board is again based on nVidia's nForce4 SLI chipset, the MSI K8N Diamond is one of the best selling nForce4 boards around. So, it was very interesting to see how this board performed.

Everything is very well organized on the board and MSI has opted to use a very effective cooling system on the MOFSET chips to further cool things down. A small drawback is the small amount of free space between the two PCI-E slots. A strong point of this board is the Creative SoundBlaster Live! 24-bit chipset that is used and will impress when it comes to audio requirements. There are no ICs to control the SLI features, but the standard nVidia SLI bridge does the job as well.

The retail package has pretty much everything you can ask for, to get the board running.

With most tests, the performance of this board compared favourably with the performance of the ASUS A8N SLI Premium board, but this was more or less expected since both boards use nVidia's chipsets. The K8N Diamond performed excellently when we tried to overclock the CPU.

An overall very good board. You can find it for approximately US$190.00.

Pros:

• Excellent features
• Very Good performance
• Good Retail Package
• CoreCenter (Monitor utility within Windows OS)
• SLI support
• ActiveMOS (lower component temperature)
• Excellent motherboard overclocking capabilities

Cons:

• ActiveMOS may be incompatible with some after-sale CPU fans
• Space between the two VGA boards should be increased for better cooling.

Features
Performance
BIOS/Overclocking
Value for money