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| Introduction | ||||||
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Not too far back, there was a time when it was inconceivable that a motherboard had anything other than a green or mustard colored PCB that had a few sockets for the CPU and DIMMs, maybe a hard drive connector or two, and a floppy drive connection. Keyboards and mice were typically PS/2 based, although a COM port sufficed for those still attached to their serial mice, and the list of input/output options were quite few. The late 90's brought about the rise of the Universal Serial Bus, a new standard for interfacing with devices intended to retire legacy serial and parallel ports (although that still has yet to fully come about). Integrated LAN options as well as limited IGPs also began to expand the options of a motherboard, essentially making motherboards almost completely integrated, while taking sales away from third-party AIB vendors. One final piece of the puzzle came about by adding audio to the mainboard, most often by the way of an audio CODEC chip. Up until now, a few companies had tried their hand at producing audio cards with mixed success. The king of add-in audio solutions, Creative Labs, held court by either outperforming or simply outpurchasing the competition, until they were left as the de-facto standard. The onrush of integrated components, however, lowered the demand for many of Creative's higher-end (and higher priced) audio cards. It's estimated that the retail sales of their discrete audio cards only accounted for 10% of their total sales number for 2006. Logically, to stay competitive and keep the Sound Blaster legacy alive, there was really only one direction to turn to; to get "creative" in the motherboard field as well. On-board solutions from Creative Technology, as they are now known, are not necessarily new. Onboard versions of their Live! chipset have been around mostly on OEM boards for years, and the 24-bit Sound Blaster Live! has been promoted on some of the upper level boards in the last couple of years as a suitable replacement for gamers with support for 24 bit, 96 kHz surround audio and EAX Advanced HD. MSI was one of the first manufacturers to adopt it in the K8N SLI Platinum and it is MSI that again pushes the envelope by including an integrated solution based on the Creative X-Fi audio processor.
The bundle included with the P6N Diamond was nearly identical to what we found with the P965 Platinum, and we can't complain as it covers almost everything we could think of. This includes six SATA data cables (two more than the P965), rounded IDE and floppy cables, three SATA power cables, and the I/O shield. Two brackets provided in the bundle allow for additional FireWire and USB connections, as well as a means of diagnosing issues with the motherboard via a LED readout. A Quick Installation Guide, User's manual, registration form and a collection of driver CDs round out the bundle. The user manual is mostly complete, covering everything from setting up the hardware to fine tuning the BIOS and audio. |
| Board Features & Utilities |
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Like most of MSI's recent boards, the MSI P6N Diamond is a full-sized, 9 mounting hole, ATX board that sets off the various components in almost neon colors against a blackish PCB. Its most striking feature would have to be the copper heatsinks and piping that connect the North and South Bridges to a radiator placed above the CPU socket area, venting off excess heat directly out the back of the chassis. The positioning of the heatsinks may cause some concern when using a large after-market heatsink, such as some of Zalman's designs. As it is, using the stock Intel cooler, there is almost no clearance between it and the North Bridge heatsink/fan a slight few centimeters from the radiator. The old adage, "measure twice, cut once", will probably hold true here, as you should really double check that your cooler will actually fit into the socket area before attempting to install it.
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| Testing Setup & SANDRA Benchmarks | |||||||||||||
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How we configured our test systems: When configuring our test systems for the following set of benchmarks, we first entered their respective system BIOSes and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High-Performance Defaults." Next, we saved the settings, re-entered the BIOS a second time, and manually set memory timings for DDR2-800 at 4-4-4-12 1T latency. The hard drives were then formatted, and Windows XP Professional SP2 was installed. When the Windows installation was complete, we installed the drivers necessary for our components, and removed Windows Messenger from the system. Auto-Updating and System Restore were then disabled, and we set up a 768MB permanent page file on the same partition as the Windows installation. Lastly, we installed all of our benchmarking software, defragged the hard drives, and ran all of the tests.
We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran three of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the latest SANDRA suite (CPU, Multimedia, and Memory) with the MSI P6N Diamond, using our Core 2 Duo E6300 processor and 1GB of DDR2-800 DDR2 set at 4-4-4-12 timings. All of the scores reported below were taken with the processor running at its default clock speed of 1.86 GHz.
The latest version of SiSoft's synthetic suite, SANDRA XII, had a completely overhauled database of components to choose from. We selected a grouping of hardware for each module that we wanted to compare against. As you can see from the screen captures, the methodology has changed somewhat in the graphing of the scores; dots are used to place the currently being tested component and the four samples. For easier comparisons, the red dot signifies the MSI P6N Diamond's performance, and the blue dot is a similarly capable CPU or pair of DIMMs. We used purple for older or weaker components and orange for more advanced. When it came to CPU performance (CPU and Multi-media modules), the P6N Diamond scored just a bit higher than the 1.83 GHz Core 2 Duo used for comparison, which is exactly as expected. Memory performance, on the other hand, suffered somewhat. The bandwidth results were the lowest of all the chipset/memory combos chosen for this test, even scoring lower that the NV650i. |
| Futuremark Testing: 3DMark06 & PCMark05 | |||||||||
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3DMark06's built-in CPU test is a multi-threaded "gaming related" DirectX metric that's useful for comparing relative performance between similarly equipped systems. This test consists of two different 3D scenes that are generated with a software renderer, which is dependant on the host CPU's performance. This means that the calculations normally reserved for your 3D accelerator are instead sent to the central processor. The number of frames generated per second in each test are used to determine the final score.
In the second of our suite of synthetic tests, we found that the MSI boards trumped the Asus P5B-E, with the P6N Diamond leading the pack overall. The two boards based on the Intel P965 architecture were much more closely paired together, with the nForce 680i powered P6N besting them both by 50-70 points.
For our next round of synthetic benchmarks, we ran the CPU and Memory performance modules built into Futuremark's PCMark05. For those interested in more than just the graphs, however, we've got a couple of quotes directly from Futuremark that explain exactly what these tests do and how they work. "The CPU test suite is a collection of tests that are run to isolate the performance of the CPU. The CPU Test Suite also includes multithreading: two of the test scenarios are run multithreaded; the other including two simultaneous tests and the other running four tests simultaneously. The remaining six tests are run single threaded. Operations include, File Compression/Decompression, Encryption/Decryption, Image Decompression, and Audio Compression" - Courtesy FutureMark Corp.
PCMark's CPU performance scores, however, didn't paint as lovely as a picture. Here, the P6N Diamond placed smack dab in the middle of the two P965 boards. As a consolation, we still see the two MSI boards leading the way over the Asus P5B-E.
"The Memory test suite is a collection of tests that isolate the performance of the memory subsystem. The memory subsystem consists of various devices on the PC. This includes the main memory, the CPU internal cache (known as the L1 cache) and the external cache (known as the L2 cache). As it is difficult to find applications that only stress the memory, we explicitly developed a set of tests geared for this purpose. The tests are written in C++ and assembly. They include: Reading data blocks from memory, Writing data blocks to memory performing copy operations on data blocks, random access to data items and latency testing." - Courtesy FutureMark Corp.
The memory performance scores similarly placed the P6N Diamond directly between the P965 Platinum (trailing by 36 points) and the Asus P5B-E (leading by 19 points). It's possible we could have tinkered around in the BIOS of the P6N Diamond and possibly tweaked some of the memory timings, of which there were plenty, to gain an even better score, but we're satisfied in the performance we've seen so far. |
| WorldBench 5 - Office XP & Photoshop Performance | ||||
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PC World Magazine's Worldbench 5.0 is a Business and Professional application benchmark, that has replaced the aging and no-longer-supported Content Creation and Business Winstone tests in our suite. Worldbench 5.0 consists of a number of performance modules that each utilize one, or a group of, popular applications to gauge performance. Below we have the results from each module, recorded in seconds. Lower times indicate better performance here, so the shorter the bar the better. As we have seen in the Futuremark benchmarks, the MSI P6N Diamond sort of flip-flops around in our testing, leading here and losing there. Whereas the two P965-based boards basically ran neck-and-neck with each other in both the Office and Photoshop performance runs, the P6N Diamond was two seconds faster on the average when running Office applications, yet 10 seconds slower when working with images in Photoshop. |
| Rendering & Encoding Times | ||||||||
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The Cinebench benchmark is an OpenGL 3D rendering performance test, based on the commercially available Cinema 4D application. This is a multi-threaded, multi-processor aware benchmark that renders a single 3D scene and tracks the length of the entire process. The time it took each test system to render the entire scene is represented in the graph below (listed in seconds).
While we might have expected the trend to continue, Cinebench showed no differences in the time spent on rendering the image, in single or multi-threaded testing. All three boards posted identical times throughout.
In our custom LAME MT MP3 encoding test, we convert a large WAV file to the MP3 format, which is a very popular scenario that many end users work with on a day-to-day basis, to provide portability and storage of their digital audio content. In this test, we created our own 223MB WAV file (a never-ending Grateful Dead jam) and converted it to the MP3 format using the multi-thread capable LAME MT application in single and multi-thread modes. Processing times are recorded below. Once again, shorter times equate to better performance.
There isn't much more to say about encoding times either; again we saw the exact same times during single-threaded and multi-threaded performance runs. Suffice it to say that either chipset seems to handle rendering or encoding tasks on par with each the competition. |
| Gaming Benchmarks | ||||||||||||
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For our first gaming test, we benchmarked the test systems using a custom single-player Quake 4 timedemo, then we set them loose on F.E.A.R. Normally, for motherboard reviews, we like to see how the boards run at very low resolutions with all the bells and whistles turned off, to make the game runs as CPU dependent as possible.
It's in the gaming benchmarks that we saw the greatest variety in performance, typically with the MSI P6N Diamond leading the way, and then by a decent margin. In Quake 4, for example, the fastest average frame rate was 155.1 frames per second, 4 frames faster than the P965 Platinum, and nearly 8 frames faster than the Asus P5B-E resulting in a 5% increase in gaming performance.
After the good showing in Quake 4, we anticipated another victory for the P6N Diamond in F.E.A.R. performance testing. What we didn't expect, however, was that the difference would once again be as vast; again nearly posting a 5% delta over both the P965 boards. |
| Audio Comparisons | ||
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To clear things up in the above picture, the "Sound Blaster X-Fi" results on the left refer to the onboard solution, while the "SB X-Fi Audio" columns on the right are for the Fatal1ty card. We can see that the Frequency response was tightest with the X-Fi Xtreme at 16-bit/48kHz, but that range nearly doubles at 24-bit/96kHz. From that point on, just about every comparison went in the X-Fi Fatal1ty's favor with a lower reported Noise Level, higher Dynamic Range, and lower distortion and crosstalk values. With that being said, though, taking a closer look at each set of comparisons shows that the differences between the onboard audio and the add-on card are very slight. Typically we don't expect the values seen in the X-Fi Xtreme columns for integrated audio solutions. Take a look at Jeff's results with the integrated HD Audio on a Gigabyte GA-M59SLI-S5 to see what we mean.
Looking at the results, we see that there is no real performance advantage for spending the money on the carded version of the X-Fi Fatal1ty (or other variants) when compared to the integrated X-Fi Xtreme Audio solution. A mere two frames separates the two performance runs, impossible to notice during the demo. When comparing the X-Fi test runs to running the same game without audio enabled, the CPU utilization loss only amounts to about a four percent delta. MSI plans to continue using the X-Fi Xtreme chipset in their motherboards to come, which means external solutions could start going the way of the Dodo. |
| Performance Summary & Conclusion | ||||
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Performance Summary: The nForce 680i SLI-based P6N Diamond performed on par with two Intel P965 boards, one from Asus and the other from MSI itself. While synthetic testing was a bit scattered, with scores falling on all sides of the spectrum, real-world tests especially in regards to gaming frame rates really showed off the P6N Diamond's potential. Gamers will also appreciate the onboard X-Fi Xtreme audio, as it has a negligible impact on performance while providing all of the goodies such as EAX support and 7.1 channel output.
As we noted earlier, the late release date of the MSI P6N Diamond could have a dampening effect on its overall sales. The architecture of the nForce 680i SLI is centered around PCI Express 1.1 and DDR2, which are still the norm, but enthusiasts looking towards the future with PCI Express 2.0 and DDR3 memory on their mind may look into some of Intel's recent forays instead. Additionally, if overclocking your system is a must, then the P6N Diamond might come across as a bit of a disappointment. We were able to get past the weak overclock we achieved on MSI's P965 Platinum, but hit a brick wall in the upper 300's on the FSB, where additional voltages and tweaking seemed to have no effect and we fell short of our goal set earlier on the Asus P5B-E. On the other hand, this board is so chock full of added extras, it's really hard to overlook it as a prime candidate for anyone looking to build a system today. It has all of the basics we've come to expect, such as onboard LAN, multiple USB ports, and support for Intel's industry-leading Core 2 Duo and Quad CPUs. What pushes this board to the lead of the pack is the inclusion of a Creative X-Fi based audio solution as well as RAID and the potential for quad-card SLI configurations. The integrated X-Fi Xtreme audio was nearly as good as an after market card, delivering quality playback and recording at levels just under that of the X-Fi Fatal1ty (which, by the way, cost us over $200 just a year and a half ago). Factoring everything built into the P6N Diamond, one might expect to find a hefty price tag attached to it. It does command a price of nearly $240, but that's actually less than some of the competition, including the ASUS Striker Extreme and DFI NF-680iLT. If you consider the price of an additional X-Fi card, it makes the P6N Diamond's price seem even better. If MSI can tweak the BIOS further to improve overclocking, we just might be looking at one of the best 680i boards out there.
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