MSI P45 Diamond

The board that should – but doesn’t. Or something.

At first glance, you’d be forgiven for assuming that the cooling on this board is less extreme than the Platinum – it’s actually quite the opposite. On top of the Northbridge (all covered with [strike]cheese[/strike] tubes) is a transparent plastic cover, with nozzles, tubing and clamps included to hook up to any watercooling loop. The benefit of including it here is that the whole cooling array will effectively be watercooled, as the heatpipes connect all the components.

There isn’t much room around the CPU socket for larger heatsinks, though water blocks will fit just fine. Support for DDR3 is present, using a strange choice of light pink and blue – hardly appealing to most enthusiasts. Power, IDE, FDD and SATA are all in the same placements as the Platinum, and are accessible even in a system that is cramped with oodles of tech (not to mention water cooling).

The same buttons are also present down there (in the corner most likely to hold such luxuries), but may prove difficult to reach when using Crossfired dual-slot cards.

Moving to the expansion slots, there’s only six available out of the usual seven – our guess is that one lane was sacrificed to allow the two eSATA ports on the back panel (reinforced by the presence of a VIA chip in the area). The back panel itself has eight USB ports, two Ethernet, one Firewire, PS/2 ports and a clear CMOS button – but no audio. This is due to the included X-Fi audio module, interfacing through a PCIe 1x slot. While a strange inclusion, the card offers a hybrid of onboard and dedicated sound, and also supports EAX4.0 – great news for gamers.

Overclocking went without a hitch up and until we pushed the FSB over 380 – we had the same issues as with the Platinum. A few (read: about twenty) attempts later and we got to 385, which wasn’t included as it was not stable.
With a great idea, and exotic features such as soundcards and watercooling, this board remains remarkably average.