Review: MSI K9N SLI Diamond motherboard

Another AM2 motherboard to has made in into the Labs in the form of the K9N SLI Diamond from MSI.

Unlike the Asus M2N32-SLI, which uses the flagship Nvidia Nforce5 chipset the 590 SLI, the K9N uses the slightly scaled-down 570 SLI version that's aimed at performance gamers.

The major difference between the two chipsets is that the 590 SLI uses a second chip to provide support for 46 PCI Express lanes, including two full-speed x16 lanes for SLI.

The 570 SLI uses a single chip to provide support for 28 lanes and two x8 PCI Express slots.

All this means that the K9N can stick with a conventional passive-cooling heatsink.

This covers the chipset and it gives the board a more spacious-looking layout. A further heatsink covers the Mosfets (metal-oxide semiconductor field effect transistors).

The primary PCI Express graphics slot runs at x16 speed in non SLI mode, the secondary slot runs at x8.

When in SLI mode, both run at x8. Thankfully neither slots have annoying locking latches; they rely instead on a pair of plastic grips to hold the cards.

Six Serial ATA 3Gbits/sec ports are provided. These are clustered together just out of way of any large graphics cards you may be using in your SLI setup.

Controlled by the 570 chipset, you can arrange them into Raid 0, 1, 0+1 or Raid 5 arrays.

Expansion-wise there are two x1 PCI Express slots and three standard PCI slots. Dual Gigabit Lan and eight-channel audio in the form of the Realtek ALC883 are integrated into the board.

This is a good motherboard for quiet gaming system, but you'll probably have to upgrade a fair number of components at the same time.