Verdict: Includes an X-Fi and a rollercoaster heatsink, but hampered by poor overclocking.
The P7N Diamond is based around Nvidia's nForce 780i SLI chipset with its 'killer' feature of 3-Way SLI support (note the inverted commas denoting our sarcasm). However, nForce 780i SLI supports the new Intel processors built with a 45nm manufacturing process and 1,600MHz FSBs, which is much more welcome. There's no DDR3 memory support though - that's only with nForce 790i - so the P7N Diamond has only DDR2 sockets.
The P7N Diamond has four 16x PCI-E slots - three for 3-Way SLI and a fourth slot so that you could use four graphics cards to run eight screens. You'll have to use two single-slot cards in the lower two graphics slots for this. As usual with nForce 780i SLI, the top two graphics slots have 16 PCI-E 2.0 lanes, while the third graphics slot has 16 PCI-E 1.1 lanes (the fourth slot has just eight PCI-E 1.1 lanes). The single PCI slot is only available if you don't use a dual-slot card in the secondary PCI-E graphics slot. You can use 3-Way SLI with the bundled PCI-E Creative X-Fi Xtreme Audio sound card, as the two 1x PCI-E slots are placed between the primary and secondary PCI-E graphics slots.
However, the audio chip on the bundled X-Fi Xtreme Audio is the lowliest of all Creative's X-Fis, and although it's compatible with EAX 1.0 to 4.0 (one short of the latest iteration, EAX 5.0 HD), these effects aren't hardware-accelerated. Still, you have access to the X-Fi's 3D headphone effects and the Crystalizer, its MP3-improvement setting.
If you want hardware EAX acceleration, you'll need to buy an X-Fi Xtreme Gamer. However, fitting this willl be a problem, as there's only one PCI slot; this sits directly below the second high-speed PCI-E slot, so if you run dual-slot graphics cards in SLI, it will be obscured.
The Northbridge, Southbridge and nForce 200 chip on the P7N Diamond are cooled by MSI's latest Circu-Pipe technology - an elegant mix of copper heatsinks and heatpipes. It leaves enough room around the CPU socket for an Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro cooler.
MSI has also managed to fit the power and device connectors neatly around the edge of the PCB, with the S-ATA II sockets rotated so that your S-ATA cables will lie flat with the motherboard tray. The power and reset buttons on the lower right-hand edge are also welcome.
We hoped that the P7N Diamond would be good at overclocking, since it was sluggish in our stock speed tests. A score of 930 in our Gimp image editing test is far from great, and the Handbrake H.264 encoding score of 979 was also slower than we'd want. However, it was the poor 811 in the multitasking test that really brought down the overall score.
The board had no trouble in maxing out our test CPU; with the motherboard's FSB set to 1,832MHz (the BIOS shows the effective, quad-pumped speed), our CPU ran fine when overclocked from 2.66GHz to 3.66GHz. However, the board displayed a few irritating quirks while overclocking. Extra voltage is added to the CPU by repeatedly pressing the plus or minus key, rather than via a menu that can be quickly navigated using the cursor keys. Also, the CPU voltage is shown as a relative value (up to +0.3875V), while the other voltages are absolute values. We were pleased to see GTL and PLL options, but generally, the BIOS was awkward to work with.
Even when overclocked, the P7N Diamond didn't impress. The overall score of 1,125 is only 12.5 per cent better than our reference system at stock speeds, despite the CPU running 38 per cent faster.
The early BIOS used on our retail boxed sample refused to let us drop the CPU multiplier, so we couldn't test for a maximum FSB. MSI rushed us an update towards the end of testing, which allowed us to drop the multiplier, but the board refused to POST when we added extra voltage to the CPU. This was frustrating, as the board benchmarked well with an FSB of 500MHz (2,000MHz effective) and could clearly go higher, but the CPU had reached its limit at stock voltage. Also, the CMOS needs to be cleared after a bad overclock, so we had to re-apply all our settings from scratch every time an overclock failed.
Conclusion
Including the X-Fi with the P7N Diamond is a nice move, as it's better than most boards' on-board audio. However, this is a premium-priced board that offers poor performance and has a BIOS with some significant quirks. MSI has told us that it's working on the BIOS issues, but in the meantime, we can't recommend the amazing £105 Asus P5K Premium WiFi-AP enough.
