3DMark06

The CPU tests do not show much of a difference, but it is more evident in the 3DMark results.

Overclocking

Overclocking with air cooling isn't the easiest of tasks. The Zalman CNPS9500 for AM2 is a great cooler though and we did manage a solid 224FSB overclock in the past with the MSI K9N Platinum. We were hoping for more this time around with their premium board and we were met with some success. We managed a stable 225FSB overclock, just 1 MHz more than before. While technically this would indicate an improvement, it wasn't as much as we had hoped. We should mention that we did need to rest the CMOS a few times during testing, and put the CMOS reset button to work. It did work as advertised, but you will need to hold the button down for a couple of seconds for it to take effect.

Final Words

We were very pleased with the MSI K9N Diamond in many ways. It is thus far the fastest AM2 board we have tested, with very good build quality. The layout was very good, and there were no areas we felt MSI missed the boat on. We liked the CMOS reset button, as it makes recovering from unbootable system changes very easy. The two heatsinks for the MCP and SPP do help in controlling the heat, though we were a bit surprised MSI did not add passive coolers around the CPU area as in the past. Given the Diamond version of the K9N uses the Creative audio controller, the sound quality was excellent indeed, which is something one can appreciate after getting used to AC'97 onboard audio.

Stability was excellent, stock speeds and overclocked. ActiveArmor, a feature found in NVIDIA's previous generation of nForce boards, has been removed this time around and so far it seems to have reduced the number of complaints revolving around data corruption. As it's been well documented here, the Seagate NCQ drives have always seemed to cause us grief with nForce boards but thus far with the nForce 500 series, the problems seemed to have disappeared.

Overclocking went well considering we stuck with air cooling. We did have some problems once we passed the comfort zone, but we've seen various levels of success depending on the CPU used. We did have a fixed ratio of 11, so our options are a bit more limited than those which FX CPUs.

SLI was something we were not able to test due to an inventory issue that came up during the course of this review. We did do some quick tests before running into these issues and we can say that we were unable to determine any appreciable difference in performance between the 570 SLI and the 590 SLI using 7900 GT cards. Keep in mind that the the 570 only features dual x8 lanes. Other features, such as LinkBoost look nice on paper, but unless you have GTX based video cards, you'll miss out on this feature.

If given a choice, we think MSI's K9N SLI Platinum provides slightly better bang for the buck for gamers on a budget. The performance gap between that board and the MSI K9N Diamond really isn't that large at all. That said, those looking for a premium 590 SLI based board will be well served by the K9N Diamond. It has the same features as most 590 SLI boards in its price range but also offers a premium sound solution. If you do have a high-end CPU and a pair of $500+ video cards, the MSI K9N Diamond really is the only way to go.

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