The MSI X38 Diamond Motherboard

The MSI X38 Diamond was not my first choice of motherboard for this article. I was grateful to MSI, however, for providing me with this fantastic board. One of the key features to this motherboard is the support of DDR3 and the support of the required 133FSB needed for this testing. The original board I chose was the MSI P6N Diamond with the Nforce 680i chipset. Unfortunately, the board required a hardware modification to support the quad core CPU. Although it has been fixed now, the rework was not available at the time I wanted to do my testing.

The X38 Diamond is an enthusiasts' dream. This board has heatpipe cooling across the X38 chipset which MSI call Circu-Pipe. This cooling provides a completely silent cooling system for the chipset and it also looks very sexy. It's finished off in a polished copper look.

It also has TroubleShoot Poster, which is a set of four LEDs that provide debugging information during boot-up. The readout will identify things like faulty RAM, CPU or video card, providing a much quicker way to find the root of a problem. I've been using a PCI card version of this exact same tool for many years and to see it built into a motherboard is very cool.

MSI's box also boasts about made-in-Japan solid capacitors. Solid capacitors apparently have a life span of up to six times those of liquid capacitors. Anybody whose been around the traps for a while will remember seeing more than their fair share of popped capacitors, a rampant problem through the industry just a few years ago.

Another very cool feature set, for me, or anybody having to set up a test system, are the onboard power and reset buttons. This board is basically designed for me! I could not personally have requested any extra features. Those two little buttons are right next door to four SATA II ports supporting Matrix RAID and behind them is another two that can support RAID 0/1.

One of the other features which you may notice from the photos, is the amount of PCIe slots that this board has. The board supports two PCIe 2.0 x16 which fully support ATI's Crossfire technology. It also has two PCIe 1.0 x4 and one standard PCI slot. Plus it has another two full length x16 slots but here's the catch - they only support 4x speeds. The marketing on the motherboard box might deceive a few people who think they're getting four PCIe slots that run at the full x16 speed since they call all this "Quad PCI Express x16 slots". Interesting creative marketing there! I mentioned that the board will support Crossfire. It does not support NVIDIA's SLi.

Looking at the back panel you can see al of the extras - well beyond what you'd see on an average board. There are eight USB ports, two eSATA ports, one 1394 port, two Gigabit LAN ports, optic fibre audio, a full set of 7.1 audio connectors and for all you retro keyboard and mice users, there's even PS2 connectors.

The motherboard is made within a dark chocolate PCB. Anybody doing an extreme case mod would not be disappointed with the look of this PCB - on both sides.

Being an MSI enthusiast board, the X38 Diamond features MSI's well known Core Cell technology.

The board I received came with five fan headers and a missing sixth system fan header, which might be an option on certain revisions of the board. Five fan headers are more than ample for providing any system with all the cooling it would need.

Overall, this board was able to do everything I asked it to do. I didn't use it for any overclocking, since that wasn't what I was testing in this article, but I couldn't help but notice that it has all of the features that you'd need for overclocking and tweaking. The MSI X38 Diamond is by far one of the nicest boards I've had the pleasure of working on in quite some time. I experienced 100% stability during all of the testing. It didn't miss a beat. If you're looking for a high end motherboard and SLi is not a requirement, then this board would be able to provide you with all the PC tweaking glory you could possibly want.