windwithme

I still remembered that the 1st test of last New Year¡¦s Day is Athlon 3000+ with MSI K8N Neo4, suddenly, a year passed¡K

Since the AMD release the socket 939 Opteron, it makes a huge quake from the price, the overclock ability, and the 1MB cache.
I got 3 Optron 144, the average performance between 1.4V, 2.6~ 2.8GHz, I choose the best one for test.




and the K8N Diamond Plus which is tested before, this is full package for retail, the highest class which includes the vacuum tube front panel.

The Package



Accessory
Diamond is the highest level of MSI motherboard, the accessories are full of package.



The whole view of motherboard



The improvement of retail version
The part of MOS are changed to aluminum shell capacitors



The electrolytic capacitors are all KZH except for the few ones, the components are good and better appearance



Only these 3 electrolytic capacitors are not KZH¡¦s



The Creative Audigy SE 7.1 Ch. Audio codec



The another version of Plus is bundled with the vacuum tube front panel
The aluminum panel is good at quality




The capacitors of front panel



Test platform
AMD 939 Opteron 144
MSI K8N Diamond Plus
G.Skill 1GBFF
Seagate 7200 7 160GBX2
Enlight 420W


The CPU Cooler is the original box one, 1.45V



As I mentioned before, there is one more




3DMARK2003


@ X16



@ X4


3DMARK2005


@ X16



@ X4



It¡¦s clear that the 3DMark 2005 has bigger difference of PCIe bandwidth
But I don¡¦t know whether the 3DMark 2006 has more performance difference or not.
The new version of BIOS is added one tweak option
It do real help for the DRAM overclock



I don¡¦t know whether the component quality of retail version is better, the new BIOS, or the memory controller of Opteron is more powereful, I reach the Super Pi 32M@ 512x2 DDR600 1T 2.75V. I feel great to reach the emblematic sign at least.
(ps. I¡¦m not sure this board will be like the DFI Ultra-D, reaching DDR600 stably on every board.)



The ASUS A8N32-SLI I got last month.



I tested it for a couple of hours.
512x2 is close to DDR580 1T
DRAM do not have the high voltage option, the Integrated audio is cheap AC¡¦97, except the heat pipe is quite good quality, there is no more features.
Maybe somebody ask for the 8-phase MOS design, but what I know is that the 3-phase MOS design of Ultra-D is already great at overclocking, and the design of nF4 is configured 3 or 4 phase.
For example, if I want to make a fast car, the 8 tires do not equal to fast speed, the right way is enhance the engine and the other parts.
The 8 phase MOS design follows the same principle.



Opteron is really a charming AMD CPU, but the major defect is the supply shortage, I hope to get the 146, 3GHz one.
Diamond Plus is a great AMD motherboard at feeling/spec/overclock sides with over standard performance, I expect the MSI delivers the board at Jan.
I already made the test of BIOS/DRAM in detail at the article ¡§The most luxurious NVIDIA SLI 16X motherboard- MSI K8N Diamond first look¡¨
windwithme wish you Happy New Year 2006!

jmke

Great pictures, great tests (I love the 16x vs 4x PCIe thanks!)

Happy New Year Windwithme

__________________

windwithme