MSI K9N2 Diamond Series Motherboard

This mainboard is based on NVIDIA Nforce780a SLI single chipset. The

mainboard supports all AMD processors: Phenom, Athlon and Sempron. It has 4 DDR2

DIMMs which can go upto a max of 8 GB. The LAN support is for 10/100/1000 fast

Ethernet dual LAN by Realtek 8211BL/8111C. It also has 2 IDE ports, 6 SATAII

ports and 2 ESATA ports. The SATA port supports RAID 0/1/0+1/5 and ESATA ports

supports RAID 0/1 mode. The board carries 3 PCI Express x16 slots which are

compatible with PCIE 2.0 specification. The board has 3-way SLI technology that

allows 3 GPUs to run in sequence and enhance the performance of a graphic

intensive application. The board comes with an X-Fi Xtreme audio card powered by

creative CA0110 audio chip. This supports up to 8 channel SPDIF audio and allows

users to attach 2,4,6 or 8 speakers for better surround sound.

The motherboard was tested with 320 GB SATA 7200 rpm HDD, Athlon 64X2 dual

core 3800+ 2.0 GHz processor, 2 GB DDR2 533 MHz RAM and Windows XP SP3. The

score for 3D Mark, PCMark and Pov ray benchmarks were 7386, 1093 and 40,590

respectively. The CineBench scores were: 1 CPU-1665 and x-CPU-3225. To test the

gaming performance we used GeForce 9600 GT for UT3 and obtained a score of 94

Fps.

Bottomline: Its performance and the support for

three graphics card makes it a value for money board for gamers.