MSI’s P4N Diamond motherboard

The specs
To get things started, let’s have a look at the board’s specifications.

The P4N Diamond is anchored by an nForce4 SLI Intel Edition chipset, and the board owes much of its functionality to the NVIDIA core logic. At the north bridge, the nForce4 SLI Intel Edition serves up a dual-channel DDR2 memory controller, 19 PCI Express lanes, and SLI support. CPU support is a little problematic, though. NVIDIA hasn’t validated the nForce4 SLI Intel Edition for use with the Pentium D 820, and nForce4 boards only recognize one of the processor’s two cores.

NVIDIA’s official line on the nForce4 SLI Intel Edition’s lack of Pentium D 820 support is that there is little point to validating a high-end chipset for a budget processor. However, with NVIDIA now pimping a new nForce4 SLI X16 chipset to high-end customers, the vanilla nForce4 SLI has become more of a mainstream chipset—a mainstream chipset that lacks support for Intel’s most attractive mainstream processor. Now more than ever, the nForce4 SLI Intel Edition needs to support the Pentium D 820.

But I digress.

Returning to the chipset, the nForce4 SLI Intel Edition’s north bridge connects to the south bridge with a HyperTransport link that offers 1.6GB/sec of bandwidth. With all of the chipset’s PCI Express lanes up in the north bridge, that should be plenty of pipe for the south bridge’s bandwidth-intensive network and storage controllers. On the networking front, the south bridge sports a hardware-accelerated Gigabit Ethernet controller with a built-in firewall, while storage buffs are treated to a pair of ATA/133 channels and four Serial ATA ports capable of 300MB/sec transfer rates. RAID enthusiasts should also be impressed with the fact that NVIDIA’s RAID software can span multiple arrays across both ATA and SATA drives.

The nForce4 SLI Intel Edition’s integrated networking and storage controllers are arguably the most impressive around, but they’re apparently not enough for the P4N Diamond. MSI also packs the board with PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet and Serial ATA RAID chips from Marvell and Silicon Image, respectively. Both chips sit on their own PCI Express connections, so they won’t be constrained by limited PCI or interconnect bandwidth.

Some may consider the P4N Diamond’s extra GigE and SATA chips a little excessive, but few should argue with MSI’s decision to forgo the nForce4 chipset’s dated AC’97 audio controller in favor of an on-board Sound Blaster Live! 24-bit. The Live! doesn’t promise wondrous hardware acceleration for 3D audio, but it does support high-definition sampling rates and resolutions.

The board
The P4N Diamond is another one of those boards that would look a whole lot better if it weren’t dotted with so many multicolored slots and ports. Any aesthetic potential that the black board and silver heatsinks may have had is ultimately dashed by the mess of yellow, orange, green, and lavender ports and slots that populate the landscape. At least the P4N Diamond’s manual refers to some of the ports by their color, so there’s some utility to the ugliness.

Fortunately, the P4N Diamond’s layout is better than its looks. Despite the wealth of integrated peripherals and on-board components, the board is devoid of any major clearance problems. Power plug placement definitely favors traditional ATX cases the mount the power supply above the motherboard, though. The P4N Diamond’s primarily and auxiliary power connectors are both mounted near the top edge of the board, which might present problems for upside-down ATX cases that mount the PSU below the mobo.

While we’re on the subject of power, note that the P4N Diamond also features a four-pin Molex connector to the left of the north bridge. The connector is there to provide a little extra juice to systems running a pair of graphics cards in SLI.

To the north of the, er, north bridge, the P4N Diamond has a decent amount of clearance around the CPU socket for larger heatsinks. Interestingly, unlike many high-end LGA775 motherboards, the P4N Diamond’s voltage regulators aren’t equipped with heatsinks. The north bridge chip is, and it also sports a fan. We’re not too crazy about active north bridge cooling, largely because tiny north bridge fans tend to develop an annoying, high-pitched whine over time. We’ve seen at least one other nForce4 SLI Intel Edition board make do with only passive north bridge cooling, and it would be nice if the P4N Diamond could do the same.

Below the CPU socket, the P4N Diamond’s array of expansion ports looks a little thin. Another PCI Express x1 or PCI slot would be welcome, but a couple of things conspire to make that impossible. First, with on-board PCI Express peripherals consuming a pair of PCI-E lanes, the chipset only has enough free lanes for a single x1 slot. Second, there simply isn’t any room on the board for another expansion slot. We’d normally see a slot mounted between the PCI Express x16 slots, but MSI’s paddle-less SLI switch monopolizes that part of the board.

MSI’s P4N Diamond press kit makes a point of highlighting the board’s digital SLI switch, and while it’s certainly slicker than an SLI paddle switch that users have to physically flip, I’m not sure by how much. Flipping an SLI paddle takes all of a couple of seconds, and if a user already has the case open to install a second graphics card, it’s really not a big deal.

Beyond the PCI Express x16 slots, we stumble upon the board’s passive south bridge cooler and a tidy row of Serial ATA ports. Users with longer graphics cards need not worry about the south bridge cooler; it’s a low-profile design that shouldn’t get in the way. Longer graphics cards won’t interfere with the board’s DIMM slot tabs, either. Unlike with some boards, memory modules can be installed in and removed from the P4N Diamond with a graphics card installed.

Moving to the port cluster, the P4N Diamond offers a little bit of everything, including coaxial and TOS-Link digital S/PDIF audio outputs. While it’s nice to have a choice between two flavors of S/PDIF output, it’s a shame that MSI doesn’t include a digital S/PDIF input, either alongside the dual digital outputs or at the expense of one of them.

In addition to what can be found in the port cluster, the P4N Diamond also comes bundled with a pair of PCI brackets that feature two more Firewire and USB ports. The board also has headers for an additional four USB ports.

BIOS and tweaking software
MSI has done well with the P4N Diamond’s features and layout, but what about the BIOS?

It gets off to a good start, serving up control over a number of memory timings, including the DRAM command rate.

Overclocking options are also plentiful, with front-side bus speeds available up to 350MHz and CPU overvolting options as high as 0.4V above stock. Like other nForce4 SLI Intel Edition boards, the P4N Diamond also has a wealth of memory dividers to draw from; so many that rather than choosing a divider from a massive list, users simply key in a target memory clock and the BIOS automatically selects a memory divider that will produce a memory speed as close to the target value as possible.

If old-school overclocking isn’t your thing, the P4N Diamond’s CoreCell chip also allows for dynamic overclocking based on CPU loads. The CoreCell chip can ramp CPU speeds within one microsecond of a change in CPU load, but dynamic overclocking doesn’t appear to work when Intel’s SpeedStep and Enhanced C1E halt state are also enabled.

Many motherboard manufacturers now offer dynamic CPU overclocking, but too often the auto-overclocking options are enabled by default and unnecessarily obfuscated. The P4N Diamond’s BIOS does dynamic overclocking right. It’s disabled by default, and the various overclocking degrees are clearly labeled to avoid confusion.

In addition to CPU overclocking, the P4N Diamond’s BIOS also offers limited graphics card overclocking options. Users with NVIDIA NV4x-based graphics cards can use the BIOS to increase core and memory clock speeds by between 1 and 15%. Again, this capability is disabled at default, as it should be.

Like most recent Pentium platforms, the P4N Diamond’s BIOS supports temperature-based CPU fan speed control. Users can also set a target temperature and tolerance for the CPU fan, but there’s no BIOS-level fan speed control for the system or north bridge fans. The BIOS also lacks user-configurable temperature- and fan failure-based alarm and shutdown conditions.

If you’re uncomfortable poking around in the BIOS, NVIDIA’s nTune system utility brings some of the P4N Diamond BIOS’s functionality to Windows. The board doesn’t support nTune’s voltage and fan speed control, or its hardware monitoring capabilities, but it does provide access to basic bus tweaking and a handful of memory timings.

Perhaps the P4N Diamond doesn’t fully support all of nTune’s features because MSI would rather users run its CoreCenter software. CoreCenter allows users to adjust the front-side bus speed and manipulate system voltages, but it doesn’t provide access to the CPU multiplier, which is only available through the BIOS. However, CoreCenter does feature temperature- and fan speed-based alarms.

Our testing methods
Today we’ll be comparing the P4N Diamond’s performance with that of the boards featured in our recent LGA775 motherboard round-up.

All tests were run three times, and their results were averaged, using the following test systems.

With the exception of the XPC SD31P, our test systems were powered by OCZ PowerStream power supply units. The PowerStream was one of our Editor’s Choice winners in our latest PSU round-up.

We used the following versions of our test applications:

• SiSoft Sandra Standard 2005 SR2a
• WorldBench 5.0
• TCD Labs HD Tach v3.01
• Futuremark 3DMark05 Build 120
• DOOM 3
• Far Cry v1.3
• Unreal Tournament 2004 v3323
• RightMark Audio Analyzer 5.5
• RightMark 3D Sound 1.24
• NTttcp
• Cinebench 2003
• Sphinx 3.3

The test systems’ Windows desktop was set at 1280×1024 in 32-bit color at an 85Hz screen refresh rate. Vertical refresh sync (vsync) was disabled for all tests. Most of the 3D gaming tests used the Medium detail image quality settings, with the exception that the resolution was set to 640×480 in 32-bit color.

All the tests and methods we employed are publicly available and reproducible. If you have questions about our methods, hit our forums to talk with us about them.

Memory performance

The P4N Diamond settles for the middle of the pack in our memory bandwidth and latency tests. It’s a little slower than the other nForce4 boards, but not by much.

WorldBench

Although the graph shows it near the back of the pack, the P4N Diamond’s WorldBench performance is on par with that of most of the competition.

Gaming

MSI steals a handful of wins in our gaming tests, with the P4N Diamond claiming victory in DOOM 3, Far Cry, and one of 3DMark05’s CPU tests.

SLI gaming performance
Our first round of gaming tests were conducted with low in-game detail levels and display resolutions, but we’ve cranked things up for a second round. These tests use high resolutions, high detail levels, and anisotropic filtering and antialiasing, so they should be more indicative of how gamers play in the real world. They also present a nice environment for our SLI-capable systems to show off with a second GeForce 6800 GT graphics card installed.

The P4N Diamond is competitive in our SLI gaming tests, and even comes out ahead in Unreal Tournament 2004. UT2004 doesn’t see much of a performance boost from a second graphics card, though.

Cinebench rendering

Scores are pretty close in Cinebench, with the P4N Diamond failing to distance itself from the field.

Sphinx speech recognition

Sphinx is highly dependent on memory bandwidth, and the P4N Diamond settles for the middle of the pack.

Audio performance

Although the P4N Diamond’s on-board SoundBlaster Live! 24-bit audio chip doesn’t offer hardware acceleration for 3D audio, its CPU utilization is lower than much of the competition.

Audio quality
We used an M-Audio Revolution 7.1 card for recording in RightMark’s audio quality tests. Analog output ports were used on all systems. To keep things simple, I’ve translated RightMark’s word-based quality scale to numbers. Higher scores reflect better audio quality, and the scale tops out at 6, which corresponds to an “Excellent” rating in RightMark.

The P4N Diamond’s on-board audio chip pays dividends here, where it’s at least as good—if not better—than the rest of the field. Shuttle’s XPC SD31P is the only platform that keeps pace with the P4N Diamond in RightMark Audio Analyzer, which isn’t surprising considering that both platforms use the same SoundBlaster Live! 24-bit audio chip.

ATA performance
ATA performance was tested with a Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 ATA/133 hard drive using HD Tach 3.01’s 8MB zone setting.

The P4N Diamond’s ATA performance matches that of the other nForce4 boards.

Serial ATA performance
Moving to Serial ATA, we tested performance with a Western Digital Raptor WD360GD SATA hard drive. Again, we used HD Tach 3.01’s 8MB zone test.

Serial ATA performance is pretty even across the board, with the P4N Diamond’s nForce4 and Silicon Image SATA controllers performing up to expectations.

USB performance
Our USB transfer speed tests were conducted with a USB 2.0/Firewire external hard drive enclosure connected to a 7200RPM Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 hard drive. We tested with HD Tach 3.01’s 8MB zone setting.

As expected, the P4N Diamond’s USB performance is comparable to the other nForce4 motherboards.

Firewire performance
Our Firewire transfer speed tests were conducted with the same external enclosure and hard drive as our USB transfer speed tests. The enclosure’s speed is limited to 1394a, so our 1394b-equipped motherboards won’t be able to fully stretch their legs.

Incidentally, enclosure speed may not be the limiting performance factor for 1394b. Windows XP Service Pack 2 has performance problems with 1394b devices, and although Microsoft has issued a patch to address the issue, performance with 1394b Firewire controllers is still rather poor. Third-party drivers are available that apparently bring Firewire 1394b up to speed, but neither Abit nor Gigabyte make such drivers available for their 1394b-equipped motherboards. Since rolling back to Service Pack 1 is a rather unattractive solution to the problem, we’ve tested the motherboards that sport 1394b Firewire chips with and without Microsoft’s SP2 Firewire fix.

The P4N Diamond isn’t equipped with a fancy 1394b Firewire chip, so it doesn’t suffer from the performance issues that plague some of the other boards.

Ethernet performance
We evaluated Ethernet performance using the NTttcp tool from Microsoft’s Windows DDK. The docs say this program “provides the customer with a multi-threaded, asynchronous performance benchmark for measuring achievable data transfer rate.”

We used the following command line options on the server machine:

ntttcps -m 4,0,192.168.1.25 -a

..and the same basic thing on each of our test systems acting as clients:

ntttcpr -m 4,0,192.168.1.25 -a

Our server was a Windows XP Pro system based on Chaintech’s Zenith 9CJS motherboard with a Pentium 4 2.4GHz (800MHz front-side bus, Hyper-Threading enabled) and CSA-attached Gigabit Ethernet. A crossover CAT6 cable was used to connect the server to each system.

The nForce4 boards were tested with the NVIDIA Firewall and Jumbo Frames disabled.

While the performance of the P4N Diamond’s nForce4 Gigabit Ethernet controller is impressive, the board’s secondary Marvell GigE chip consumes more CPU cycles than much of the field.

Overclocking
We started our overclocking tests by dropping the P4N Diamond’s CPU multiplier to 14, the lowest available multiplier for our Pentium 4 660 3.6GHz processor, and slowly cranking up the front-side bus speed. With a front-side bus speed of 255MHz, the board would post, but it wasn’t stable, so we backed down to 250MHz. From there, we turned our attention to the memory. With more relaxed 4-4-4-12 memory timings, we were able to get our Corsair DDR2 memory stable running at an effective 917MHz—faster than we’ve had the memory running on any other motherboard. Finally, we bumped up the CPU multiplier to 15, which overclocked our processor to 3.75GHz.

We’ve included scores with the P4N Diamond running at stock speeds with aggressive 3-3-2-8 and relaxed 4-4-4-12 memory timings, and overclocked to 3.75GHz with relaxed timings.

Our overclocking efforts are good for a decent performance boost in Cinebench, but only modest gains in Sphinx. Sphinx loves memory bandwidth, and in this case, our stock config’s aggressive memory timings almost outshine our overclocked system’s higher clock speeds. However, as is always the case with overclocking, your mileage may vary.

Conclusions
There’s plenty to like about the P4N Diamond, including its SLI support, PCI Express peripherals, excellent onboard audio, and overclocking-friendly BIOS. In fact, as far as integrated features go, it’s the best-equipped LGA775 motherboard we’ve come across. The P4N Diamond is no slouch when it comes to performance, either. It might not be the fastest board around, but it can definitely hang with the competition.

We’re a picky bunch here at TR, and while we do like the P4N Diamond, the board has a few issues that we should point out. Our first complaint isn’t even really MSI’s fault. NVIDIA’s failure to support the Pentium D 820 with the nForce4 SLI chipset is unnecessarily limiting, and as the prices of SLI boards drop to more affordable levels, increasingly annoying. MSI can’t do much about that, but it could expand the P4N Diamond BIOS’s fan speed control to include north bridge and system fans. Users shouldn’t be forced to run the CoreCenter Windows software to get control over temperature and fan failure alarms, either.

At $217 online the P4N Diamond is a little pricey for an nForce4 SLI board, especially considering that Asus’ P5N2-SLI Deluxe can be had for under $170. However, the MSI board has a few features that the Asus does not, including a PCI Express-based secondary Gigabit Ethernet controller and an on-board SoundBlaster Live! 24-bit. The P4N Diamond’s extra peripherals make it easy to endorse if you’re actually planning on using all the on-board goodies. However, if you don’t need secondary GigE or SATA controllers and are planning to run a discrete sound card, the P4N Diamond loses much of its allure.