Nvidia caused a real stir by launching the SLI version of the nForce4 chipset, so much so that most motherboard manufacturers now offer some form of SLI board in their range. And with the company's recent announcement that it wants to introduce the SLI platform into the mainstream market, even more boards will appear. MSI's K8N Diamond SLI board, however, is aimed squarely at the high-end user and offers a whole host of features and extras.

The board is built around a Socket 939 and supports all AMD's Socket 939 CPUs including the latest X2 Dual-Core processors. With a 1GHz HyperTransport link, the board offers plenty of performance potential; a Sysmark04 score of 203 proves this. The board features CoreCell technology, which is MSI's dynamic overclocking utility; along with other options in the BIOS this allows for a fair degree of tweaking.

Four DIMM slots are provided, supporting up to 4GB of either DDR266, 333 or 400 DDR1 memory. Besides the two x16 PCI-E graphic card slots there are three standard 32-bit PCI slots.

MSI has added its latest Active MOS 2 MOSFET cooler to the board. This uses a fan and heat-pipe combination for cooling, and with the chipset also actively cooled you may wonder how much noise is being generated. But both fans run fairly quietly, and as this is a board that will be used with two graphic cards and their associated fans, any chipset fan noise should pale in comparison.

If you are one of those people with a number of drives, the K8N Diamond might be just the board for you. There are four SATA II (300MB/s) ports and two ATA ports controlled by the nForce4 SLI chipset. By using Nvidia's NV RAID utility (which supports RAID 0, 1, 0 + 1 or JBOD), all of them can be combined into a RAID array. If this wasn't enough there are two more SATA II ports controlled by a Silicon Image controller which supports RAID 0, 1 and JBOD arrays.

The choice of audio chip for the K8N Diamond is a surprise. MSI has turned to Creative for this and used a 24-bit SoundBlaster Live! 7.1 chip, the first time this chip has appeared on a motherboard. There is also dual Gigabit Ethernet onboard.

As is the norm with high-end boards these days, the box that the K8N Diamond comes in is stuffed full of extras; a bracket with two USB 2.0 ports (there are four already on the back-plate) and MSI's D-Bracket with its four diagnostic LEDs, plus another bracket housing six- and four-pin FireWire ports. Then there are the four SATA cables, single rounded ATA and floppy cables, two SATA power splitters and an SLI bridge connector.

MSI's K8N Diamond is a very capable, well featured, high-end SLI board with a host of options in the BIOS to push its already impressive performance to a higher plain.