People seem to be apprehensive when DDR3 technology first came out. There were a lot of things to worry about. First off, Intel chipsets were the only one that was supporting DDR3 memory. That would mean buying a totally new motherboard. Secondly, any new component or hardware is bound to come with high price tags. All these made people reluctant to transition to a new platform, that is until NVIDIA themselves decided to come up with their own chipset that was capable of handling DDR3’s high bandwidth. And that’s none other than the nForce 790i SLI chipset, which MSI is proud to introduce in their P7N2 Diamond.

Lately, MSI’s enthusiast boards have been packaged with awesome bundles and you wouldn’t expect less with the P7N2 Diamond especially since it’s a high-end board. We’re talking about ample amounts of storage cables (SATA, IDE), two external modules offering additional eSATA ports, a FireWire port, USB ports, more cables for powering up the eSATA devices, three SLI ribbons, and a funky looking X-Fi Xtreme audio card, which is now encased in a black enclosure dubbed by MSI as an electro shield to bring down electromagnetic interference.

After having tested some of MSI’s newer boards, we were hoping that MSI started using a different cooling solution other than the Circu-Pipe design. Despite that, MSI has improved in the layout of the components on the board so you won’t come across any clearance issues as we did with previous mobos. One of the new features this board comes with are the Hi-c CAPs (highly-conductive polymerized Capacitor), which are all made in Japan. These next gen solid capacitors offer great overclocking headroom due to their low impedance characteristics. Other noticeable features include two IDE connectors, as opposed to only one. Now MSI managed to cram in four PCIe x16 slots. However, the nForce 790i can only support two Gen 2 and Gen 1 slots. So the last one (probably the yellow one), is an x8 one. On the other hand, you get a chance to set up a total of eight monitors (a rarity but hey, the more the merrier!). Among the expansion slots are the two x1 slots and a PCI 2.2 slot. MSI has done well in maintaining a clean layout over the past months; a very nice touch indeed.

After testing a few boards with the nForce 790i, we were sure the board would perform amazingly. True enough, PCMark awarded the P7N2 Diamond with a CPU score of 9,617, a memory score of 6,755, a graphics score of 13,242 and a HDD score of 6,663, which were all calculated to give an average PCMark score of 10,187.

We’ve been very impressed with what the nForce 790i SLI chipset is capable of. And MSI has given us a board worth talking about.

MSI P7N2 DIAMOND SPECIFICATIONS:

PROCESSOR TYPE: Intel Core 2 Quad / Extreme / Duo / Pentium 4 / Pentium D 9XX/8XX

CHIPSET: NVIDIA nForce 790i Ultra SLI

FSB: 1600/1333/1066/800

SOUND: Creative X-Fi Xtreme audio card

NETWORK: Realtek RTL8211BL

DIMM: 4x DDR3-2000 (E.P.P)/1600/1333/1066/800 (8GB max)

SATA: 6x SATA II

PATA: 2x

FLOPPY: 1x

PCIE 2.0 x16 (full): 2x

PCIE 1.0 x16 (full): 1x

PCIE 1.0 x16 (x8): 1x

PCIE x 1: 2x

PCI 2.2: 1x

REAR I/O:

1 x PS/2 Keyboard

1 x PS/2 Mouse

1 x 1394 port (FireWire)

2 x eSATA

1 x CMOS clear swtich

2 x RJ45 LAN jack

6 x USB 2.0



Source: http://hardwaretechreview.com/msi-p7n2-diamond-motherboard-review