MSI P7N Diamond

Anyone know anything about this board. I just found it on the egg.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130158
The board seems to have better chipset cooling and uses high quality POSCAP solid capacitors. I like the fact that is has esata. From the looks of it I would say it competes pretty well with the Striker II Forumla. I do like the Striker II layout a bit more. I've had good luck with Asus in the past. I've never owned a MSI board. Anyone have any opinions on MSI?


I can't seem to find any reviews on this badboy.
thanks in advance

bumpy mc. bumperson

I've been interested to see what people say about this too. Like the Striker II, it's a non reference design, so hopefully it improves upon the power-phase and capacitor quality issues of the EVGA and XFX boards.

yeah, I hope it turns out to be an option for me. I like the features it has. Plus, it's 50bucks cheaper than the Asus

Hello everyone,
I'm quite new to this forum. At the moment I have a Striker II working in my comp, unfortunatly it overclocks very bad (can't really get past beyond 400/410 MHz FSB) and runs hot. I already changed the thermalpaste and installed a Scythe Kaze Mini Ultra 40mm fan ontop the NB cooler.

I originally wanted to wait for the P7N Diamond. But I couldn't get any release dates. One of my trusted shops mailed me two days ago that they have it in stock now, I ordered it today and it's been shipped to me.

I'll report back about it.


Greetings from germany!

Fantastic! I would love to hear what you think. I need to complete my build and this mobo looks nice.

Just recieved a DHL package... the mainboard is sitting on my working desk. Yet again, I can't install it, since I am also waiting for my new CPU cooler, which hopefully will arrive sometime this day.

First impressions:
Packaging
The board comes in a large, shiny and good looking box. It is as large as the RoG boxes we know from Asus. You can see all the descriptions, it is well pictured and you can see what you get.

Once you open it up, you see a plastic cover and a quick overview guide. The included material is very nice, although a bit week on the software side....

The important things:
- The MSI P7N Diamond mainboard itself
- The Creative Labs X-Fi Xtreme Audio PCIe card

Cables, Connectors, and stuff
- 3 SLI bridges for usual and triple SLI. These are "soft" bridges, unlike the hard PCB ones which come for Asus and XFX/EVGA
- 1 IDE cable
- 1 Floppy cable
- 6 SATA cables
- 3 SATA power cable adaptors
- 1 Firewire (1x) and USB (2x) bracket
- 1 E-SATA bracket (2x E-SATA, 1x power connection)
- Additional E-SATA cables which I don't really know about
- Back IO shield (cheap one, the newest RoG shields from Asus are waaaaay better)
- Multiple "Quick Jumpers" for easier cable connection on the board

Manuals, CDs, and so on
- 1 Quick overview
- 1 Quick Installation Guide
- 1 User Guide
- 1 X-Fi Xtreme Audio MSI Edition guide
- 1 Driver and Utility Disk for Windows XP
- 1 Driver and Utility Disk for Windows Vista
- 1 X-Fi Xtreme MSI Edition Disk

The software is pretty much standard. All drivers are included, some system and overclocking tools are also available on the disks. The RoG boards always have a decent game included (Blitz had STALKER, Striker II had Company of Heroes Opposing Fronts), but I guess this is not on the important side.

In any case, you can see that the packaging is very complete and you get everything you need. I like the X-Fi card included, it should be way better than most Onboard solutions or the Supreme FX II cards used by Asus.

Mainboard
The mainboard itself comes with a black PCB, my first impression was mixed. The colors are... too much. It is much more colorful than the RoG mainboards or the reference boards from nVidia.

You get four PCIe x16 slots (2 PCIe 2.0 16 lane, 1 PCIe 1.0 16 lane and 1 PCIe 1.0 8 lane), two PCIe x1 slots and one PCI slot. A not unimportant difference to Asus and reference designs come with the additional PCIe x1 slot:
Even with triple SLI, one of them stays clear, so you can still use a PCIe extension soundcard, for example the included X-Fi. On reference design, you are forced to use Onboard sound.

For hard disks and DVD drives you get six SATA II ports, two IDE (which is very rare today, usually only one slot is common nowadays) and one floppy port.

The backpanel features PS/2 ports for keyboard/mouse, 2 E-SATA ports, 6 USB 2.0 ports, 2 LAN connectors, one 1394 port, 1 "Clear CMOS" button (which I find very helpful).

The cooling on this board is massive. While it might not look as massive and crowded than the one used on the Striker II, it seems to be of a higher grade quality. The whole cooling systems features four heatpipes, the center is a cicular shaped pipe which fits ontop of the NB cooler. I am curious to see how it handles the hot 780i chipset.

CPU area is nice and clear, there are no obvious things in the way for larger high-end coolers. But wait...
The already mentioned circular shaped pipe on the NB cooler is so high, that it interferes with some tower coolers. Just checked my Ultra-120 Extreme and on the first look, it doesn't seem to fit since it clashes against that circu-pipe. It's just a matter of 1 or 2 mm.
I just hope my Noctua NHU-12P fits there....


That's it for now, waiting for GLS service to bring my cooler package.

yeah, the color scheme is much to be desired but I could care less if the board works great.
I remember seeing some info saying that the board is a great overclocker. I hope this is true and the chipset cooling does a better job than some of those other 780i boards.

Thanks for the update.
Keep us posted.

I saw that a few days ago. It's a wild OC, and wonder whether or not that'll be par for the course for this motherboard. I somehow doubt it.

it looks nice, but for me the placement of pci express slots could have been better.

yeah, you're right about the PCIe slots. I'm waiting to pull the trigger on a 780i mobo. I hope some reviews come out for this bad boy soon.

yeah, well for me the EVGA has done well for me, though one has died that I had. Though it wasnt me who caused it, i have a feeling my buddy who i gave it to killed it as he did to his 680iLT board he had before.

EVGA 780i is a contender for sure. I'm up in the air between that, MSI and the Striker II.
I still have a little time since the q9450 wont be out for a few weeks.

Have you had any RAM problems with the EVGA board? Whatever mobo I get I want to run 8gig Geil Evo One 1066.

for me nothing so far, though the chipset heatsinks run a little warm, I put a 60mm fan ontop so hopefully that will help. The one that died on me was not due to it dying, it actually might be a user error with my buddy as I gave him the board when it was working just fine and he gives it back to me dead, he has another board with the same problem so I am going to assume he might be the cause. It could be a short or that stupid bfg power supply he has.

My build will be kinds similar to yours. If I can get a mobo nailed down in the next week I might just get the Qx9650. All that would be left after that will be some GPUs.
I'm leaning towards EVGA 8800GTS (G92) in SLI.

Love that TJ09 case

Greetings, I just installed everything.
Installation of a large tower CPU heatsink is a mess. The Ultra-120 Extreme didn't fit at first, the ordered Noctua NH-U12P fit with only maybe 0,5mm space between the NB cooler. I guess it would be wiser to chose a more classic cooler like Enztec Ultra-X, Xigmatek HDT-D1284 or Thermalright SI-128 for use on this mainboard.

Anyways, I haven't done much testing. The BIOS itself is worse than the Striker II one. Memory voltage for example can only be adjusted in 0,10v steps, while the Asus delivered 0,02v steps. The CPU voltage adjustment is also strange for me. Obviously you can only configure, what kind of voltage increase you want. Don't know why they haven't included a direct voltage selection like everybode else.

No on for the first test:
My Striker II managed to reach 420 MHz FSB with some trouble. It was more or less luck to get into Vista with these settings. It was rockstable at 400 MHz.
Right now I am running 450 MHz FSB with an E8400, result is a 4050 MHz CPU clock. Voltage for the CPU core has been increased by 0.2000v, whatever that really results in.
Tried 0.1675 first, but Vista bluescreened right after bootsequence. Voltages for chipsets are:
NB: 1,42v
SB: 1,55v

I'll see if this is stable. I sure hope so....... on a sidenote I really hope that they improve the BIOS layout. Maybe it is just too new for me, but I preffered the Asus one. Menu for memory timigs has also been better layouted. The OC menu of the P7N looks simply too crowded. Was overall better organized at the Striker II.

Jesuswept said:

My build will be kinds similar to yours. If I can get a mobo nailed down in the next week I might just get the Qx9650. All that would be left after that will be some GPUs.
I'm leaning towards EVGA 8800GTS (G92) in SLI.

Love that TJ09 case

Click to expand...

Good choice, you will like it.

If I wasn't going to do any extreme or even medium overclocking would the Striker 2 be a good choice. What is your overall impression of that board? I like most of its features and have read good things about it.

I've never been a fan of the highend MSI boards. They sound like they should be good and are priced right, but never work out the way I feel they should.

kirbyrj said:

I've never been a fan of the highend MSI boards. They sound like they should be good and are priced right, but never work out the way I feel they should.

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I've never owned a MSI board. I've been pretty lucky with Asus. My p4p800 deluxe has been running good for years now. I just want to get my new build right because I will have to live with it for the next few years.

I guess everyone has good and bad experiences with one or another manufacturer. There are people out there who have great experiences with Asus, and some people, who just had nothing bud bad luck with them. About EVGA I read things from single persons who RMA'd four, five or more boards because they kept dying. Other people are rstill running their first EVGA board without troubles. I've always been a Gigabyte fan, until I got their P965 board.... I had nothing but the worst computer trouble within the last 7 years with this PoS. After ten BIOS updates and more frustration, I said good bye to Gigabyte and won't buy another one any time soon.

My experiences with MSI, had only one board manufactured by them, were quite good. No problems, stable, decent software and regular BIOS updates.

As for the current status of my board:
450 MHz was stable to some point, 3d applications were unstable. I had problems getting the included software to run. According to that, my RAM was only at 2,15v, while in the BIOS 2,20v has been set.
Another thing which I am not impressed with: At the moment there is no way to read out the NB/SB temperature nor their voltage. Asus works fine in that category.

Right now the board runs at 440 MHz FSB and looks stable. No 3d crashes, Prime95 was stable for over an hour - until I stopped it. The NB cooler gets really hot, just like the Asus one. I just can't say how the temps look like compared to Asus.

I am not sure which one is better at the moment:
MSI is more overclocking friendly (at least for me), delivers and actual usable PCIe X1 slot for Triple-SLI, but lacks in more advanced BIOS settings.
Asus has much more advanced system tools which can check voltages, temperatures, etc. and delivers more sensitive overclocking options.

On the long run I guess, you aren't doing anything wrong with either boards. At the moment the reports about the Asus 780i boards aren't positive, other people are reporting that it already got better with recent BIOS updates. Abut the P7N, you read nothing about it, since it is simply brand new. On the other side though, I hear not many negative things about the reference designs. So which one to take? I cant say. Maybe the Asus boards get better within the next weeks, maybe they will keep their problems. I am in the same situation: Should I send my MSI back and keep my Asus, or should I do vice versa and sell the Striker II on ebay? I just don't know.
We'll find out in a few months. Maybe Asus manages to get their Striker II sorted and it will mutate into THE 780i solution. Maybe it'll keep struggling and MSI manages to pull ahead off any 780i boards. Or maybe... both of the large, old fashioned mainboard manufacturers have to make place for nVidia reference boards in terms of stability and especially overclocking.

anymore updates?

sounds like some of these issues could be a simple bios update for this P7. I am interested to see what develops.

Nothing special to be honest. I am still working on different FSB and voltage settings. Managed to tune the NB Vcore down to 1,375v from 1,4275 for 445 MHz FSB. My E8400 needs quite much Vcore though.... already up to almost 1,38v at ~4,0 GHz.

I still haven't tried any harder FSB speeds with over 450 MHz. For me it appears more stable than Striker II at the moment and personally I already repackaged the Striker II and photographed it so I can sell it on ebay in the next couple of days.

Jesuswept said:

I've never owned a MSI board. I've been pretty lucky with Asus. My p4p800 deluxe has been running good for years now. I just want to get my new build right because I will have to live with it for the next few years.

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I've had a P4P800, P5W DH, and now a Maximus Formula, and I've not had any problems with any of them. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend Asus for high end Intel boards personally. I had a s478 MSI board that crapped out on me, and my Neo4 Plat SLI board wasn't great either.

How is everything else working out for you, besides overclocking? Did you get the board up and running without any major headaches? The more and more I read about these 780i boards the more I'm leaning towards and X38 and a single slot GPU solution.

It's working great by now. At the moment I am too tired of the overclocking experiments, it runs pretty good at just above 4 GHz with the CPU at 445 MHz FSB at the moment.

I have had no problems. Setup and installing the whole thing went without headaches. The only troublesome thing was the heatsink installation for the CPU, since that massive tower almost clashed against the circu-pipe NB heatsink, it was difficult to get those fan clips on the CPU heatsink.
The machine booted right up, booted straight into windows without any problems. Rebooted, went into BIOS, set the whole thing to 450 MHz, fooled around with some RAM and voltage settings, saved everything. The PC booted again, Vista boot went fine and it was stable for the usual desktop/internet applications. Very impressive compared to Striker II: That board sometimes didn't even POST when settings were changed. The P7N has yet to fail to POST for me.

The question is simple:
Do I want SLI or not? At the moment I think SLI is attracive. 8800 GT 512 MB boards are available for just under 200,- Euros here, the older 8800 GTX just starting to drop below the 300,- Euro barrier. First people actually bought three 8800 GTs to setup their triple-SLI machine.
On the other side, the 9800 GX2, which is a multi-GPU single slot card (like 3870 X2) should be available by end of march. This way, you still have multi-GPU power with X38 boards.
SLI simply is the primary reason to go with nForce chipsets. Right now I only have a single GTX, but since prices are getting very attractive, I'll get a second one by end of this month.

I just installed this board a few minutes ago. I had an EVGA 780i installed with a q6600 and all was well. I then decided that I needed to get a QX9650, so I ordered it, it came in and I installed it on the EVGA. Well, it was a no-go. The bios wouldn't allow me to change the cpu vcore or cpu fsb voltages at all. No matter what I changed them to, they stayed at voltages that were way too low out of spec. Sometimes it would boot, other times it wouldn't. I could never even boot to the Vista desktop, the system would shut itself down. So, I pulled the 9650 and installed it into my second rig, that has a DFI X38 mobo and the cpu worked perfectly. Voltages were able to be changed, Vista booted and I could play COD4 without an issue.

As luck would have it, I had ordered an MSI P7N earlier in the week from newegg, just to play around with. I got it in this morning and installed it with the QX9650 and all is well again. The cpu works great, voltages can be adjusted and it boots everytime, well it does now that I upped the dram voltage to 1.95 from auto (running 4 sticks of 2gig for 8gig total).

All in all, the board runs very well. I'll post more when I have had a chance to mess with it some more.

Shawn

Steelwormpilot, Your posts were very helpful for me. Still, I didn`t exactly recognized if the thermalright 120 extreme fitted that msi mobo (looks to me that noctua is 2,5 milimeters thinner what I`ve read from specs). Where I live (Poland) there`s a little choice between 780i mobos, so since I`ve been using msi board couple of years ago and now running msi 8800 gtx ultra (any winter is not scary for me now ), I`ve decided to go for p7n diamond. So, there`s my question : have You tried 90 degrees angle for installing thermalright cooler (I mean airflow of optional fan goes towards northbridge) ? I would be very greatful for Your help!!

Hi ulec!
If you rotate the Ultra Extreme 120 by 90°, it should fit. There is enough room left for the RAM slots. The Thermalright cooler definatly is larger than the Noctua one and my Noctua almost leaves no space towards the NB cooler. A piece of paper might fit between them, but nothing thicker.

Had my first hiccup with the P7N Diamond. I have my multiplier set to 10X on my QX9650 (10x333=3.33ghz) and have had it running that way since Saturday afternoon. I have done several cold boots and countless warm reboots without issue and the system is 100% stable. This morning, however, I powered it on and it wouldn't post. I had to power it down and re-power it up, which it then booted to a screen that said something to the efffect that the cpu vid something something, hit F1 to enter setup or F2 to load defaults. I entered setup and it had put my multiplier back to 9. I saved and exited and am back up at stock. Seems to be some sort of bios issue, I suppose. I'll e-mail MSI and see if they are aware of it and if there is a beta bios that addresses it.

Shawn

How many bios revisions are they from the original bios? From what I remember, MSI wasn't too bad about putting out new revisions. Somewhere between Asus (lots of bios revisions) and Abit (not very many).

I've been trying to help a friend with his new build, using this motherboard. He has a q6600 g0, and the board will absolutely not post past 1190 FSB, regardless of voltages.

Awaiting a new bios in hopes that fixes it. If anyone has been able to workaround this, i would very much appreciate your input.

kirbyrj said:

How many bios revisions are they from the original bios? From what I remember, MSI wasn't too bad about putting out new revisions. Somewhere between Asus (lots of bios revisions) and Abit (not very many).

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There are at least 2 beta bios that I know of. You have to remember the original shipping bios is only a month old and is actually not bad aside from the multi issue described by Shawn. Very solid board.

Hiltonizer, is the bios able to save at 6, 7, or 8 multi with that q6600?

kirbyrj said:

I've had a P4P800, P5W DH, and now a Maximus Formula, and I've not had any problems with any of them. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend Asus for high end Intel boards personally. I had a s478 MSI board that crapped out on me, and my Neo4 Plat SLI board wasn't great either.

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The problem many people currently have with ASUS is that their RMA process can be a nightmare.

A lot of the flack they get stems from that, and a handful of boards they've released that were disasters.

I've got several ASUS boards that work fine, and then some that have been nightmares.

MSI just informed me that they have seen no issues with the QX9650 and this board. I call BS. If they don't sort this out i am jumping ship. This really pisses me off.

loonym said:

Hiltonizer, is the bios able to save at 6, 7, or 8 multi with that q6600?

Click to expand...

Hadn't given that a try, we we're too busy being pissed off that the system was rock stable at an 1190fsb but wouldn't even post at 1191... I'll have to get back over there and give it a try.

As for now, it looks like I'll be forgoing expandability to SLI, and getting a cheapo p35 board for my next build.

sd11 said:

The problem many people currently have with ASUS is that their RMA process can be a nightmare.

A lot of the flack they get stems from that, and a handful of boards they've released that were disasters.

I've got several ASUS boards that work fine, and then some that have been nightmares.

Click to expand...

Also note that I said Asus Intel boards. My experiences with Asus AMD boards have been less than stellar . Never RMA'd through Asus. I can see where that would be frustrating though.

I've had a number of Asus AMD boards that worked flawlessly. Then last year when I built an Intel system I first chose an Asus P5B-Plus. It lasted for a while. Well until I tried to use Windows Update Utility to flash the BIOS. So in order to get going again I ran to a local shop and bought an Asus P5E (X38 chipset).

The P5E seemed to be running the memory really slowly. And it would never allow me to raise the DRAM voltage until the most recent BIOS update. Now it won't seem to run with 4 DIMMs installed. And when I attempt to "test" the memory with MemTest86 it passes even extended tests, but MemTest indicates the RAM is running at 267Mhz speed with CAS 5-1-1-63 timing and Dual Channel mode, these setting remain the same even when I set the timings manually, or if I am only running one module.

This brings up the worst part about Asus motherboards. Getting them to work with you at all is frustrating. They take 48 hrs, or more, to return email queries and you won't get anything but a "pat answer". Reaching them by phone is exponentially more difficult... they close down tech support at the slightest provocation. One time I called they had closed for the Chinese New Year, and other time (just a few days later) they were closed for "bad weather" (in California!?!). To make a long story shorter, I'm going have to get another motherboard. So I can make sure that my memory is ok, because I can't tell for sure in a motherboard that appears to have a whacked out BIOS.

And yes! I'll bet the majority of those Maximus Formula owners don't even know there's anything wrong. These Asus X38 boards should all over-clock extremely well considering the timings that their BIOS is forcing on their memory. Perhaps the Asus Engineers will eventually figure things out, I don't know. I just don't want to wait around for that to happen.

So that's Two for Two Intel chipset Asus boards (yeah the P5B-Plus has a BIOS issue with the Trusted Platform Module interface... so it needs to be replaced again) that are down for the count. That's why I decided to try this 780i board. 1. It's not an Asus board. 2. It's not an Intel chipset. Add to this the fact that my video card is an EVGA 8800GTS/640, and I may really find that I like it.

I've had mixed results in the past with MSI motherboards. But the P7N Diamond seems to have a nice feature set. (specifically I need 6 SATA ports - I like the 2 eSATA ports on the backplane - Once Nvidia incorporates HAVOC into CUDA, I might be able to justify another video card - the special X-Fi daughter card helps make this purchase a decent value...) I just hope that I can get it to work with 4 memory modules. And I hope I can get the FSB to run at 333 (some 680i chipset boards had a "dead spot" in the middle of the FSB speed range...).