MSI P7N2 Diamond 790i Motherboard

Vote: Thumbs Down or Thumbs Up Our Rating: 92%       Manufacturer: MSI

Test System

Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 @ 3.16Ghz (9.5x333MHz)

Memory: 2x 1GB DDR3-1600XMP OCZ (Supplied by OCZ)

Hard Disk: 500GB Western Digital SE16 (Supplied by Western Digital)

Graphics Card: MSI GeForce 8800GTS 640MB (Supplied by MSI)

Cooling: GIGABYTE 3D Galaxy II (Supplied by GIGABYTE)

Operating System: Microsoft Windows Vista SP1

Drivers: nForce Driver 15.17, Forceware 175.16

Now it’s on to our testings, and today we have our X48T-DQ6 from GIGABYTE and the ZOTAC 790i SLI motherboard we recently reviewed for comparison. For our stock tests we again ran the memory at 1333MHz thanks to being DDR3, and a 333MHz FSB with a 9.5x multiplier.

Overclocking wise, we used a 6x multiplier with the memory ratio at 1:1 to eliminate the memory and CPU being the bottlenecks. During our overclocking the FSB for the MSI P7N2 Diamond was 561MHz, ZOTAC at 556MHz while our GIGABYTE board ran at 549MHz FSB.

EVEREST Ultimate Edition

Version and / or Patch Used: 2006

Developer Homepage: http://www.lavalys.com

Product Homepage: http://www.lavalys.com

Buy It Here

EVEREST Ultimate Edition is an industry leading system diagnostics and benchmarking solution for enthusiasts PC users, based on the award-winning EVEREST Technology. During system optimizations and tweaking it provides essential system and overclock information, advanced hardware monitoring and diagnostics capabilities to check the effects of the applied settings. CPU, FPU and memory benchmarks are available to measure the actual system performance and compare it to previous states or other systems.

First on the agenda are the memory sub-system tests. At stock speeds the X48T is able to just beat out the two nForce 790i boards, with MSI and ZOTAC at each other’s throats. It’s when we overclock we see MSI make a slight jump over the pack in the Write test, thanks to a few extra MHz on the FSB.