MSI: SLI Plus Eight

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The MSI K8N Diamond Plus offers one of the more impressive feature sets on a Socket 939 board that we have tested and is available for around US $190. The overall performance of the board was excellent and at times class leading. The stability of the board was superb in our benchmark, gaming sessions, and general application testing. However, the heatsink layout, size, and use of a cooling fan on the Northbridge chipset could have been executed better. We are also perplexed at the lack of passive cooling for the VRM components considering the board is targeted at the AMD enthusiast market. We believe MSI should take a closer look at the Asus and Abit passive cooling solutions for their next board design. With that said, let's move on to our performance opinions regarding this board.

[...]While we sing the praises of the board, we must also be aware of the faults, minor ones at that, but enough to make us wonder what MSI was thinking during the design development phase of this board. The location and size of the Northbridge heatsink along with a fan limits the cooling options available for the CPU and custom GPU cooling solutions. While MSI set out to provide a passive cooling solution for the board, they apparently got lost at the Northbridge, and never made it to the PVM area - an area that begs for passive cooling considering this board is targets the enthusiast crowd. Our limitation in not reaching the 300HTT level also underscores a potential issue for a board that was designed with the overclocker in mind, including a BIOS that now begs the user to find the board's limits, limits that come too quickly in our opinion.