Introduction

Although X38 and X48 are now starting to top out as the chipset of choice for the enthusiast and extreme gamers markets thanks to their full speed Crossfire support, PCI Express 2.0 upgrades as well as some nifty memory tweaks like XMP technology for the tame overclockers allows the chipset which started it all to remain in a good place as the mid-range monster; that being the P35 chipset.

P35 first brought DDR3 to us along with Crossfire support (though a hybrid design making it slower than X38/X48 offerings, it still gave us dual graphics card support nonetheless) and some very impressive overclocking results. In fact, P35 is often outclocking X38 and X48 chipsets. While we don't expect X38 to get any better, X48 is a premium chipset which we are hoping will exceed the P35's overclocking potential.

MSI's range of boards continue to grow much like that of the ASUS and GIGABYTE portfolio; in fact MSI is aiming at being one of the top contenders for value, features and overclocking; so far we have seen quite a few new and impressive boards from them, and when we first saw the P35 Diamond we simply had to get a closer look at it.

Today we have been given this opportunity to look at MSI's top P35 marvel designed with all the top features as well as some nice overclocking headroom. How does it perform? Let's have a deeper look.