General Performance & Encoding
The 3DMark series of benchmarks developed and provided by FutureMark are among the most widely used tools for benchmark reporting and comparisons. Although the benchmarks are very useful for providing apple to apple comparisons across a broad array of GPU and CPU configurations, they are not a substitute for actual application and gaming benchmarks. In this sense we consider the 3DMark benchmarks to be purely synthetic in nature but still valuable for providing consistent measurements of performance.
The MSI K8N Diamond Plus exhibits excellent performance in the synthetic benchmarks with scores consistently in the top range of all boards tested. The MSI board performed extremely well in the PCMark 2005 benchmark that tests overall performance in a wide range of general applications. Throughout our general application testing and usage we found the board to be very responsive and actually noticed a performance difference in Office 2003 and Photoshop CS compared to other boards in our test lab. Although not reported, this board produced the highest AMD socket 939 WorldBench 5 score during our stability testing.
The 3DMark series of benchmarks developed and provided by FutureMark are among the most widely used tools for benchmark reporting and comparisons. Although the benchmarks are very useful for providing apple to apple comparisons across a broad array of GPU and CPU configurations, they are not a substitute for actual application and gaming benchmarks. In this sense we consider the 3DMark benchmarks to be purely synthetic in nature but still valuable for providing consistent measurements of performance.
The MSI K8N Diamond Plus exhibits excellent performance in the synthetic benchmarks with scores consistently in the top range of all boards tested. The MSI board performed extremely well in the PCMark 2005 benchmark that tests overall performance in a wide range of general applications. Throughout our general application testing and usage we found the board to be very responsive and actually noticed a performance difference in Office 2003 and Photoshop CS compared to other boards in our test lab. Although not reported, this board produced the highest AMD socket 939 WorldBench 5 score during our stability testing.
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Odeen - Wednesday, April 12, 2006 - link
Hi,I wish you guys would post the EXACT BIOS (and, as necessary, jumper) settings you used to achieve your best overclocks, plus any issues you had with certain settings, etc. I'd love to see the actual notes from the lab, i.e. "Tried this clock skew value, crashed after X minutes."
While this wouldn't solve every overclocker's question, it would at least set us on the right path in optimizing our own systems, in terms of how certain values affect things.
I imagine you guys have a better understanding on what the BIOS settings do, as opposed to us everyday enthusiasts, who operate primarily on coincidences and conjectures. Especially in this age of hyper-tweakable motherboards with more and more components, it'd be really nice to know, for example, whether the hypertransport multiplier between the "NB" and the "SB" should match the chip-NB hypertransport multiplier, or whether that hypertransport bus speed is independent of HTT, and can be kept at 200/5X regardless of HTT value.
Lastly, have you tried the firewall drivers on this board, and does the firewall STILL cause bluescreens and corrupt downloads?
Gary Key - Wednesday, April 12, 2006 - link
We will need a new server to handle the notes sections for some of these boards. ;-)
We are probably heading in this direction shortly, especially for the enthusiast level boards. I will see what we can do on the next enthusiast level board with a table chart and short descriptions on how we arrived at the settings. I will say this, sometimes leaving most of the settings on Auto works best, the board/bios engineers are usually very smart about the default settings and then when you think all is okay, they hit you with a setting that should never be a default item.
We found on the MSI board, the NB-SB, SB-NB, and CPU-NB HT settings had to be synchronized or the board had stability issues. In fact, the CPU-NB default setting was at 800MHz, we had to change the option to manual, and then bump it up to 1000MHz to match the NB-SB and SB-NB HT settings at stock speeds. It does appear we had an average or below average board for the review, the latest retail sample that MSI pulled from their warehouse was able to post at 318HTT x9 with our test components.
If they are more details you would like to know, please comment or email me.
We tried the firewall with the 6.85 drivers. We could only recreate one particular situation that resulted in a corrupt download. It required the use of BitComet, downloading seven plus files (each over 200MB) concurrently, transferring the files to a media folder, and then unzipping a file while three others were still downloading. It only did it once but it did do it, is it NVIDIA or something else? I personally have not experienced any BSODs or corrupt downloads with the latest drivers, a clean load of XP, and staying away from the P2P software.
We have a new NVIDIA Business Platform system on its way so it should be interesting to see the tweaked ActiveArmor suite and driver updates that NVIDIA has been working on extensively over the last ninety days.
Gary Key - Wednesday, April 12, 2006 - link
Just not my week....Should read - If there are more details you would like to know, please comment or email me.
slashbinslashbash - Tuesday, April 11, 2006 - link
PLEASE learn the difference between "discreet" and "discrete".JarredWalton - Tuesday, April 11, 2006 - link
I don't know about you, but I like my audio solutions to be unobtrusive. Nothing worse than audio that gets in your face with static and stuff.... ;)mbhame - Tuesday, April 11, 2006 - link
"Our initial impression of the MSI K8N Diamond Plus upon opening the box is that it has an extensive feature list, cluttered yet clean layout, heat-pipe cooling system, and that the overall quality of components utilized by MSI is very good."...how can a layout be 'cluttered yet clean'?
JarredWalton - Tuesday, April 11, 2006 - link
Cluttered in that there is a LOT of stuff; clean in that it still works and there aren't any issues with connecting everything. It's an oxymoron, like "little giant". :)nullpointerus - Tuesday, April 11, 2006 - link
Now I know how to describe my room.nullpointerus - Tuesday, April 11, 2006 - link
Where are these PCIe 1x cards I've been hearing about? What exactly is available on PCIe besides video/network cards? I've heard that it's going to be a very long, slow transition to PCIe for sound cards due to noise/power issues with the spec.DigitalFreak - Tuesday, April 11, 2006 - link
See http://www.siig.com/productList.asp?pid=1013&c...">this page for examples. I do wish they made PCI-E sound cards though.