MSI’s P4N Diamond SLI motherboard ships with nVidia’s Nforce 4 Intel Edition chipset. The board features Scalable Link Interface (SLI) technology for plugging in two graphic cards. This is the first SLI board for the Intel platform from nVidia. The P4N Diamond offers six SATA ports, and is RAID 0, 1, 0+1 and 5 capable. It also features two Gigabit Ethernet ports, up to 10 USB 2.0 ports and two FireWire ports. On the aural front, the board comes with a dedicated 24-bit sound chip from Creative that is equivalent to the Creative Live! series. The board is also touted to be dual- core processor ready. MSI has a pair of SLI graphic cards to go with the motherboard in the form of NX6800GT SLI. Based on the 6800 chipset, each card offers two DVI connectors and a composite video out. The test platform we used was a Pentium IV 3.6 Hz processor, 1 GB of Micron DDR2 RAM running at 533 MHz in dual-channel configuration, and a 250 GB hard drive from Maxtor. We loaded the Forceware 71.89 drivers from nVidia, along with the latest system drivers for Windows XP. The bench returned some of the best results ever; with scores of 7905 and 19170 in 3DMark05 and 3DMark03 respectively. Doom 3 returned an impressive 99.6 fps at 1024 x 768 and 86.5 fps at 1600 x 1200. Halo also returned impressive scores of 106.94 at 1024 x 768 and 91.37 at 1600 x 1200. The gameplay in all the games was smooth, and the card played them effortlessly when the resolutions were cranked up, and even with full AA. In fact, the system benchmarks, such as ZDBench Content Creation 2004, the platform returned a score of 32.4, which is on par with AMD Athlon 64-based systems. This new nVidia-based platform is meant for a high-end gaming machine. As usual, MSI has done their bit of magic to exploit the potential in the nVidia chips to the maximum. Both the P4N Diamond, and the NX6800GT are worth their weights in gold. The P4N Diamond is priced at Rs 18,500, and the NX6800GT pair of graphic cards will set you back by Rs 57,000. Although expensive, you have to see it perform to believe it!
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