Verdict: Cheap, but not particularly cheerful

While MSI has updated its high-end nForce4 SLI range of motherboards with the K8N Diamond Plus, its mid-range model, the K8N SLI-FI remains untouched, and it shows.

For starters, you have to manually switch an SO-DIMM card to enable or disable SLI. Granted, you don't have to do this often, but most motherboards now provide this option in the BIOS. The two high-speed 8x PCI-E slots are also separated by just one 1x PCI-E slot, which makes it difficult to install two dual-slot cards in SLI.

If you don't fancy the AC97 on-board audio then there are three PCI slots, plus a further 1x PCI-E slot, if you can find anything to plug into it. The nForce4 SLI chipset provides four RAID-capable S-ATA II ports and two RAID-capable EIDE channels. There are also ten USB 2 ports and two FireWire ports, plus a single Gigabit Ethernet port.

Unfortunately, the K8N SLI-FI defaults to a Command Rate of 2T in the BIOS, which is why its out-of-the-box performance is so poor compared with the best boards on test this month. However, the BIOS does allow you to change the Command Rate to 1T, along with the usual FSB, CPU multiplier and voltage settings. For example, the CPU voltage can be boosted by up to an extra 23 per cent, while the maximum chipset voltage is 1.85V. Unfortunately, MSI only allows you to increase the RAM voltage to 2.85V, which means that some high-performance overclockers' DIMMs won't work properly.

Despite the overclocking-friendly BIOS and high potential CPU voltage, the K8N SLI-FI wouldn't benchmark stably above a 230MHz FSB, even though our test CPU, an Athlon 64 X2 4200+, ran at up to 250MHz FSB in other motherboards. With the CPU multiplier reduced to its minimum, we could only increase the FSB to 240MHz in the BIOS, although ClockGen allowed us to push it up to 290MHz.

At just £77, the MSI K8N SLI-FI is cheap, but its average overclocking performance and dated PCB layout hold it back.

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• Headphones - 12th September 2008
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• PSUs - 14th July 2008

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