Intel has had a tough time these past couple years convincing gamers that their CPUs are the best at gaming. While things kind of went back and forth between Intel and AMD, the latter scored a major blow with the release of their FX series of CPUs. Coupled with NVIDIA's release of the nForce 4 SLI, it was pretty evident that not only did they have a fight on their hands in the CPU department, but they were also behind the eight ball with chipsets. Solid as they were, the 915/925 were simply not going to be able to compete against motherboards that support two NVIDIA cards in SLI mode.

This past April, NVIDIA released the nForce 4 SLI Intel Edition which has altered the landscape for Intel, at least where gaming was concerned. As we've seen here, the chipset was more than capable at holding its own in applications, but let's face it, anyone who buys a motherboard capable of SLI is looking to do anything but work.

Today we'll be looking at our first retail Intel SLI board in the form of the MSI P4N Diamond. As with all of MSI's enthusiast products, the P4N Diamond is loaded to the gills. Add the nForce 4 SLI features, on paper, it looks pretty impressive. This board is currently MSI's top-of-the-line Intel SLI board, though with NVIDIA's release of the SLI PCIe x16 chipset a month ago, we can expect to see this board replaced (at least, category-wise) by mid-Fall.

CPU	Intel LGA775 Pentium 4 CPU, Incl. Dual Core
Chipset	NVIDIA ® nForce4 SLI Intel Edition Chipset
Memory	- Supports dual channel DDR2 533/667, using four 240-pin/1.8V DDR2 DIMMs - Supports the memory size up to 4GB
Expansion Slots	- Two PCI Express X16 slot (supports PCI Express Bus specification v1.0a compliant) Normal mode: Primary PCI-E slot is compatible with PCI Express x16 Secondary PCI-E slot is compatible with PCI Express x1 SLI mode: Primary PCI-E slot is compatible with PCI Express x8 Secondary PCI-E slot is compatible with PCI Express x8 - One PCI Express x1 slot - Two 32-bit v2.3 Master PCI Bus slots
LAN	- Supports dual LAN jacks - 1st LAN supports 10/100/1000 Fast Ethernet by Marvell 88E1111 phy - 2nd PCI Express LAN supports 10/100/1000 Fast Ethernet by Marvell 88E8053
Audio	- Creative sound Bluster Live 24-bit H/W audio

The MSI P4N Diamond

Outside of the motherboard, MSI tosses in their usual assortment of goodies including manuals, driver and application CDs, and more storage related cables than I can ever use. There are also a couple D-Brackets for adding additional external USB and FireWire ports, SLI related tools and a CPU installation clip. The CPU clip is really a novice device, but extremely handy if you're unfamiliar with LGA775 CPU installation. As some of you may know, these CPUs do not have pins on them, as they have moved to the motherboard now, and because of this, breaking a P4 setup now due to negligence is something that is happening more often than it should.

Overall, the layout of the MSI P4N Diamond is very good. There's really good space around the CPU socket, and the capacitors did not cause any problems for our Koolance and Titan water cooling kits. Component placement is done well, with the exception that a second PCI Express card may interfere with SATA cable installation if you have a large card. We'll talk a bit more about the layout as we move through the review.

The North Bridge is actively cooled by a large heatsink and fan. Shiny is probably the best word to describe it, but MSI has also taken care to make it tall, rather than fat, and this should allow some larger coolers to be installed problem free. While the cooling isn't noise free, it's barely audible even in a water cooled setup.

Just above the CPU socket are the capacitors and additional power connections. We like the location of the +12V connection, but the +5V connection will need some care to avoid routing a power cable across the heatsink fan.

There are four ram slots that support Dual Channel and a maximum of 4GB. The slots are colour coded and should make configuration easy for those who tend to gloss over the manuals. As many of you may know, Corsair was a launch partner with NVIDIA's nForce 4 SLI, so it was no surprise all our Corsair modules worked without a hitch. Our Kingston and Samsung ram also worked without incident. In regards to placement, the ram slots have plenty of clearance around them, and you should have no problems changing or adding ram with a video card installed. Some boards are so tight, video card removal is often necessary when upgrading ram.

Just beneath the ram slots are the IDE, floppy and the main ATX power connection. Unlike most Intel boards we've gotten lately where we only saw one, it was a nice change to get two IDE connections on the board. Another added bonus, thanks to NVIDIA's MCP, is the the ability to setup a RAID array using both SATA and PATA.

Right next to the ram slots are the SATA connections, CoreCell chip, South Bridge, Silicon Image 3132 controller and the front panel connections. SATA1 to SATA4 are handled by the NVIDIA MCP04 (which is passively cooled) and support RAID 0,1,0+1, RAID 5 or JBOD mode. SATA5 and SATA6 are handled by the SI controller and support RAID 0 or 1. The CoreCell chip needs little introduction as we've talked about it many times before, but in a nutshell, this is MSI's technology where many automated performance oriented features are handled by this chip.

ActiveArmor, supported by the MCP, was the industry's first hardware based Firewall when it was introduced last year. Being that it is integrated into the MCP, this frees the up the CPU, which unlike a software based solution, the CPU does not have to process packets. The nForce 4 Firewall supports remote access, configuration, monitoring, command line interface (CLI), and WMI scripts. These features allow you to have a great deal of control over how the Firewall operates should you desire, and are all able to be configured through wizards so almost everyone should have little trouble in configuring their Firewall.

The P4N Diamond comes equipped with one PCIE x1 slot, two 32-bit PCI slots and of course two PCI Express x16 slots. As mentioned earlier, enabling SLI mode limits the PCIE slots to x8 speeds, but in most scenarios, this is not an issue with gaming performance. Unlike their Athlon board, there's no need to muddle with a PCB card to enable or disable SLI.

As many audio snobs will tell you, onboard audio on motherboards are generally garbage. While we won't go so far to say that we agree, compared to a quality PCI soundcard, onboard audio is typically limited in a lot of areas, including performance and sound quality. MSI obviously thinks so, and as we've seen with their AMD SLI board, the Pentium 4 board includes the Creative Live CAO106 chip. While not as sexy as Creative's newest products, this does go a long way towards legitimizing onboard audio. At the minimum, being a hardware based controller, the onboard audio should not impact framerates as much as most other offerings that do so in software.

Rounding things out are the input and output connections. Moving from left to right, we have; two PS/2 ports, one parallel, serial and FireWire port. Next up is the coaxial SPDIF out, four USB 2.0, two Gigabit Ethernet and 8-channel audio connections.

The BIOS

MSI's BIOS offers all the usual adjustments and tweaks we're familiar with. From here, you can adjust everything from onboard peripherals to memory and CPU settings.

For the memory settings, you can let the board auto-adjust according to the memory's SPD, or manually change the settings on your own. As usual, lower numbers mean better performance, though the ability to change these settings will vary according to hardware.

The Cell Menu is MSI's custom page where you have a lot of control over the CPU and subsystem settings. While you can do things manually, for novices, MSI offers their D.O.T. (Dynamic Overclocking Technology) which can set the overclock at a preset level, from Private 1% to as high as Commander at 15%.

Assuming you stick with NVIDIA hardware, you can also boost the video card's performance much the same way with VGA Performance Boost. Again, you can boost the speed by as much as 15% provided the cooling on the video card is adequate.

Unlike MSI's Athlon board, the P4N Diamond allows the user to manually or automatically change from SLI to standard x16 for their PEG. Obviously, you still need two identical family NVIDIA cards and the supporting drivers for this to work, but the SLI daughtercard is not something you'll need to deal with anymore with this board.

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