May 21, 2008

Motherboard Review: MSI P35 Diamond

Motherboard Review: MSI P35 Diamond



Diamond is elegant. Luxury. That's the concept behind MSI P35 Diamond motherboard from MSI. The most luxury features from MSI P35 Diamond is a Creative X-Fi Extreme sound card and a Skytel modem.

Creative X-Fi Extreme sound card have better quality than onboard Realtek ALC888T sound card on MSI P35. Skytel modem is a strange feature. MSI may think that there's still a lot of dial up internet user around.



Intel P35 northbridge support LGA775 socket. It means P35 support Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad processors. P35 supports native 800, 1066, until 1333 MHz FSB.

P35 southbridge use ICH9R. It support SATA RAID 0,1,5 and 10. There's 5 SATA ports and 2 eSATA ports. 4 of SATA ports use ICH9R chip and the rest use Marvel 88SE61111 chip.



P35 supports DDR3 memory. There are 4 slots (2 pairs). Each with different colors to show dual channel support.

There's another inovative feature from MSI called Circu-Pipe. Circu-Pite is a pasive heatsink with circullar design like roller coaster.

Another added value from P35 is indicator lamp near battery area. This indicator shows information about PC malfunction. The description about indicator lamp written on manual book.

MSI P35 Diamond is the right motherboard for enthusiastm who looking for newest memory and processors support.

Specification
MSI P35 DIAMOND
Processor Type: Intel Celeron/Pentium
4/D/Core 2 Duo/Core 2
Quad (Socket LGA775)
Chipset: Intel P35+ICH9R
Memory: 4 DDR3-800/1066 dual channels 8 GB max
Graphics Card: 2x PCI Express x16
Expansion Slot: 2xpCIe x1, 2x PCI
Storage: 5x SATA, 1x IDE, 1xFDD, 2x eSATA
RAID: Raid 0,1,5, and 10
Sound Chip: Realtek ALC88T (8 channels)
LAN Chip: Gigabit Realtek RLT8111B
I/O: 1x PS/2 Keyboard
1x PS/2 Mouse
1x Firewire
1x Optical SPDIF Out
1x LAN
6x USB 2.0
2x eSATA
1x 6in1 audio

TEST RESULT
Sysmark 2004
Rating: 371
Internet Content Creation Overall: 483
Office Productivity Overall: 285

SiSoft Sandra 2007
Dhrystone ALU: 27356 MIPS
Video Encoding: 10 minutes 51 seconds
Audio Encoding: 2 minutes 5 seconds
PCMark 2005 (1280x1024): 7239 PCMarks
3dMark 2006 (1280x1024): 3985 3DMarks
Doom 3 (1024x768 high quality): 152,4 fps
Maximum FSB: 460 MHz

Testing Platform:
Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 Processor, Kingston DDR3 2GB Memory, Asus GeForce 7800 GT VGA Card, Seagate Baracuda 7200RPM 80 GB Harddisk.

www.msi.com.tw

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