MSI K8N Diamond Plus NVIDIA nForce4 SLI X16 - Advice? Comments?

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Ockie

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I'm looking into the said board. I currently have an A8N32-SLI and I'm not happy with it. My 7900gtx's are snug up against my X-Fi Fatal1ty card and there isn't much breathing room.


Anyone have any experience with the MSI K8N Diamond Plus? It's essentially the same board but better placement of everything else.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813130037
 
I highly reccomend this board.

http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1025392

Once I figured the board out I have to say it is the best motherboard I have owned to date.
Has my Opty now running at 280x10. 5/6 Divider on the memory. Rock stable. Dual prime, Prime with rthdribl, occt with rthdribl, prime + occt+ rthdribl..............

Slot layout is way better.

BUT

The slot your gonna want to use is the last orange slot and of course disable on-board sound. Some are reporting that when this particular configuration is used, a phantom pci modem shows up in the device manager. A nuisance at best since you can go in and disable it so it won't keep asking you to install the drivers, but it is something to be aware of. I'm sure it will get handled in a soon to be released bios. Right now there is no post-release bios publicly available. If you have the phantom modem issue, MSI will send you a beta bios that supposedly fixes that issue. If it were me, I would just disable it and wait for a fully tested and publicly released bios.

Thats all I know.
 
I swapped out my Asus A8n-sli for this board, after reading alot of reviews for this board and the A8N32-sli. Swapping it out without even doing a clean install of XP, and I have had absolutely no problems whatsoever. Booted up first try, and Overclocks like a champ. I also like the fact that the heatpipe on this board also includes a very quiet fan. It runs alot cooler than the Asus board. I definately recommend this motherboard to anyone insterested in upgrading to true PCI-e 16x.
 
Great mobo, much better slot layout than the Asus.

Yup, disabling onboard sound in the BIOS brings up a phantom PCI modem in Device Manager. It's no biggie - it does absolutely nothing and unless the red circle indicating its not functioning really annoys you, its nothing to worry about.

On the whole, very happy with the mobo!
 
I have this board, but I have yet to set it up. CPU prices are still too high for me right now. I just refinished a bathroom so no spare cash :mad: Good to hear al the glowing responses though.

BTW, Why was there no review of this board here @ the [H]?? They reviewed the Intel Version and not the AMD version. What gives?
 
Thanks guys, I ordered the board and it should be here tomorrow. I honestly cant wait. Good bye A8N32-SLI!


If anyone cares, I'm selling my A8N32-SLI for 155 shipped.


Once again, thanks for all the input, this seems like a great board.
 
Board was installed and it is awesome. Highly recommended. Awesome board. Has features the A8N32 couldn't touch and was a great pleassure of working with it.


Thanks to all for the input :)
 
i love it! expecially with the 7900GTX the K8N has no problems and there are 6 SATA2 ports and there is plenty!! i mean plenty of room for the card. i got the eVGA 7900GTX 512 superclock
 
.Wiggles. said:
i love it! expecially with the 7900GTX the K8N has no problems and there are 6 SATA2 ports and there is plenty!! i mean plenty of room for the card. i got the eVGA 7900GTX 512 superclock
Click to expand...



Yes, it doesn't block the sata ports or anything which it did on the A8N32. I couldn't be any happier.


It seems like this whole Superclocked spat was all thanks to Asus :mad: If this whole thing really does turn out to be Asus at fualt, I will refuse to buy thier boards ever again. This whole ordeal cost me approx $800 to figure out. I've yet to recieve problems with MSI but somehow I always buy an asus :confused: This time it's diffrent.

If anyone wants a dirt cheap A8N32 board, PM me, I'm fireselling it.
 
Just put mine on order from NewEgg. Hopefully it will be here tomorrow so I can get rid of the A8N32 and sleep easier...
 
I have a hard time Believing that anyone had problems with the A8N32-SLI Deluxe. I didn't have any problem with our test board to speak of.
 
I dunno Dan. Maybe it's not the mobo (or maybe mine was defective), but I was (and still am) having a helluva time with it. Seems like if I touch the BIOS in any way (other than to reset it to factory defaults and turn off serial/game/sata3&4/silicon raid) I have some real troubles. And if I don't, then I have troubles sometimes. I've heard people say that you need to turn off PEG for the OC'd 7900GTX's (I have a stock XFX 7900GTX@675/1700) and if I turn off PEG my Windows crashes within seconds of boot. Even when it runs fine on one boot I can't count on Windows coming up at all on the next. It's just been super flaky for me. When it's working it's slick as a greased pig, but that's only when it's working... I liked my last MSI board (K8N Neo2 Platinum). It had it's moments getting it going, but once I had tweaked it a bit and got a good BIOS flashed on it was rock solid and fast. Hopefully the MSI K8N Diamond Plus SLIx16 is as lucky for me as the last one...
 
Dan_D said:
I have a hard time Believing that anyone had problems with the A8N32-SLI Deluxe. I didn't have any problem with our test board to speak of.
Click to expand...

SxyBstrd I dunno Dan. Maybe it's not the mobo (or maybe mine was defective), but I was (and still am) having a helluva time with it. Seems like if I touch the BIOS in any way (other than to reset it to factory defaults and turn off serial/game/sata3&4/silicon raid) I have some real troubles. And if I don't, then I have troubles sometimes. I've heard people say that you need to turn off PEG for the OC'd 7900GTX's (I have a stock XFX 7900GTX@675/1700) and if I turn off PEG my Windows crashes within seconds of boot. Even when it runs fine on one boot I can't count on Windows coming up at all on the next. It's just been super flaky for me. When it's working it's slick as a greased pig, but that's only when it's working... I liked my last MSI board (K8N Neo2 Platinum). It had it's moments getting it going, but once I had tweaked it a bit and got a good BIOS flashed on it was rock solid and fast. Hopefully the MSI K8N Diamond Plus SLIx16 is as lucky for me as the last one...
Click to expand...

Sounds like the motherboard to me. Have you tried updating the BIOS at all?
 
It shipped with the 1009 BIOS (which most people posting in the forums were using and having some luck with). They had just come out with 1013, but the changes listed were not related to my problems (I didn't notice anything that said: "fixed PEG functionality, which was fundamentally broken before"). I think it is just a bad board since lots of other people have gotten theirs to work but I'm very much a once bitten type of guy...
 
SxyBstrd said:
It shipped with the 1009 BIOS (which most people posting in the forums were using and having some luck with). They had just come out with 1013, but the changes listed were not related to my problems (I didn't notice anything that said: "fixed PEG functionality, which was fundamentally broken before"). I think it is just a bad board since lots of other people have gotten theirs to work but I'm very much a once bitten type of guy...
Click to expand...

If you are getting rid of the board why not try to flash the BIOS. You never know. Just because it is not a compatiability fix does not mean it cant solve the problem.
 
I agree with you in principle, but time is always against you when RMA's need to be done and I have the distinct impression that something is definitely weird/wrong with my mobo. Rather than wait it out and miss my opportunity to RMA I went ahead and ordered a replacement (god forbid that I be without my gaming PC for any length of time) and will ship the board out as soon as it arrives. The fact that disabling certain things causes ACPI errors when attempting to install XP SP2 on a clean build (flatlined and rebuilt RAID, I even a full format of both drives which took for friggin' ever) and the same BIOS settings booting into Windows sometimes but not others makes me too leary to continue fiddling. Maybe next time around I'll give Asus another shot.
 
Less than 24 hours from order to delivery! I love NewEgg! I'm going to be installing my new board tonight. I'll let you know how it goes.
 
SxyBstrd said:
Less than 24 hours from order to delivery! I love NewEgg! I'm going to be installing my new board tonight. I'll let you know how it goes.
Click to expand...

PM me please when you do so I can help you with this.
 
Dan_D said:
I have a hard time Believing that anyone had problems with the A8N32-SLI Deluxe. I didn't have any problem with our test board to speak of.
Click to expand...
Mine's been great too, BUT having the slots setup differently would be nice. Two video cards with NV Silencers and a sound card shouldn't be this tight on an 'enthusiast' board. On the 7900GTX's the fan is in the middle of the card, which I don't think would provide enough airflow with that souncard in between. I'm eyeing that 512MB of VRAM though; flight sims like lots of VRAM.
 
roaf85 said:
Sounds like the motherboard to me. Have you tried updating the BIOS at all?
Click to expand...

Could be, but it's tough to say. Sometimes it isn't even the board, but rather the combination of parts used to build the system. One board might work in a specific combination better.

Brad1011a said:
Mine's been great too, BUT having the slots setup differently would be nice. Two video cards with NV Silencers and a sound card shouldn't be this tight on an 'enthusiast' board. On the 7900GTX's the fan is in the middle of the card, which I don't think would provide enough airflow with that souncard in between. I'm eyeing that 512MB of VRAM though; flight sims like lots of VRAM.
Click to expand...

True, but really the slot setup is adequate. You can make it work with anything you want to use, it just isn't the best way they could have done it. Yes the 7900GTX will work with the fan being blocked to that degree. No it won't cool as well, but the 7900GTX cooler is pretty damned good.
 
I've been looking at the Thermalright V-1 Ultra for my upcoming 7900GTX's (I'm trading one 7800GTX to EVGA, and selling the other), but it's hard to tell from reviews if the V1-Ultra's frontside takes an extra slot or not. If not I could put the sound card in the bottom slot. I'm also not sure if the SLI bridge would reach around its heatpipes.
 
So I got the MSI K8N Diamond Plus in and had a successful install (I did have to do it clean since it didn't just boot happily into Windows with the old drivers, but I generally prefer to do that anyway). I was relieved to find that I was able to get my Zalman 7000 on the processor with plenty of room to spare (it's probably half an inch or more from the NB fan). Windows installed like a charm (no ACPI errors) and I played about 7 hours of Oblivion today without so much as a grumble. I like the layout on the board a bit better than the A8N32, though the Asus is the more beautiful board in my opinion. But so far this one boots up every time and hasn't had trouble with my 7900GTX so I'll keep my fingers crossed.

Everything seems to be running real nice, but I can't play DVD's for some reason... I can use DVD Roms (Oblivion comes on DVD and works just fine), I can play CD's, the drive browses everything normally, but PowerDVD (which I have been using with varying hardware for more than a year) throws an error immediately and Windows Media Player (with the nVidia PureVideo codec installed) can't seem to do it either. I'm guessing it's some kind of driver or DLL problem, but I'm at a loss as to what (DXDiag runs great and my hardware seems to report normal operation). Any ideas?
 
SxyBstrd said:
Everything seems to be running real nice, but I can't play DVD's for some reason... I can use DVD Roms (Oblivion comes on DVD and works just fine), I can play CD's, the drive browses everything normally, but PowerDVD (which I have been using with varying hardware for more than a year) throws an error immediately and Windows Media Player (with the nVidia PureVideo codec installed) can't seem to do it either. I'm guessing it's some kind of driver or DLL problem, but I'm at a loss as to what (DXDiag runs great and my hardware seems to report normal operation). Any ideas?
Click to expand...
Have you tried Windows decoder check? Since you have two installed it will tell you which is primary, if they're installed properly, and will let you change it:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=de1491ac-0ab6-4990-943d-627e6ade9fcb&DisplayLang=en
 
Thanks Brad, I gave that a look. It has the nVidia PureVideo as the primary driver for WMP 10 and gives it all green marks. It even reads the disc contents in WMP and displays the list of chapters and such, but when I click on one it says "WMP cannot skip to the location" and it never plays anything. I spent a couple hours searching last night and didn't come up with any good answers... Maybe a re-install of Windows is needed AGAIN? Grumble, grumble.
 
Even when I copy a .vob file to my desktop and try to open it in WMP I get the "WMP cannot skip to the requested location". This was a clean install dangit. Sigh.
 
If I rename the vob to mpg it plays sort of in WMP 10, and I can play the VOB using mplayer2.exe (the really old WMP). Somewhere something is not right in the registry I think... Bah. :(
 
Alright, I managed to get it straightened out finally. Ripped out all DVD codecs that had been installed and downloaded a tiral of PowerDVD 6. For some reason that worked. Go figure. At least it isn't a hardware issue.
 
Congrats. on figuring it out. They're not supposed to conflict, but I guess you only need one anyway. I use the PureVideo decoder on my HTPC, and Nero's on the desktop PC, but I don't really watch videos there, but occasionaly I'll burn a classic movie from TCM.

I guess we wouldn't attempt building PC's if we also didn't expect (maybe relish) some troubleshooting. It keeps us sharp as we learn along the way, and can keep things interesting.
 
True, though it's always nice when things just work too. ;-)
At least I haven't had a single hardware crash, failure to boot, or any problems indicative of hardware issues so far (and I probably spent 20 some hours playing with it over the last three days, mostly gaming). It's been smooth and fast. With any luck it will continue to be smooth sailing for a while...
 
I have 2 problems with K8N Diamond board thus far:

(1) The board is reading my 2Gb OCZ PC3200 (2-3-2-5-1T) memory dimms at 333Mhz speed or PC2700. I adjusted my FSB ratio's so they were 1/1, but that didn't seem to help. I also upped my Dram voltage to 2.8, with no help. Is the board down speeding my ram because of the tight timings I am trying to run? Does this board and still very early BIOS just hate my TCCD memory modules? Working on this...

(2) I haven't decided whether the NB fan blowing all the chipsets' heat directly onto my CPU HSF is that great of an idea. I am trying to design my own fan system that pulls the hot air up, rather than directly onto my CPU HSF to see if I can prevent the whole area from building up too much heat. Any thoughts ont that??

I have not tried the new beta BIOS on MSI's website, but I probably will later this week. Otherwise, everything has booted nicely and Windows installed without a hitch. However, the memory and heat issues keep nagging at me...

B33
 
Does anyone have any idea if you could fit a big typhoon on this board. Would it conflict with the heat pipe? Also how loud is the little chipset fan that is on the heatpipe? Thanks, Rob
 
RobDMB said:
Does anyone have any idea if you could fit a big typhoon on this board. Would it conflict with the heat pipe? Also how loud is the little chipset fan that is on the heatpipe? Thanks, Rob
Click to expand...

Not sure about the typhoon, but the fan on the NB heat sink is not very noisy. It's merely the location and orientation of the fan that annoys me.

B33
 
B33, how many DIMMs are you using? If you're using 4 double sided, then I think you're out of luck... I remember being surprised to see that you can only use 2 double sided DIMMs at PC3200 speed, but I think that's actually a limitation of the chipset, not the board itself (the same applies to the ASUS K8N I believe).

As to the NB fan, I have it blowing directly on the back of my 7900GTX and it hasn't caused me any grief so far (the card shows temps ~43C coming out of fairly lengthy sessions of Oblivion).

I put a Zalman 7000cu on my CPU with plenty of room to spare, but I'm not sure how it's dimensions compare to the BigTyphoon...

If you try out the new BIOS, let us know how it goes!
 
SxyBstrd said:
B33, how many DIMMs are you using? If you're using 4 double sided, then I think you're out of luck... I remember being surprised to see that you can only use 2 double sided DIMMs at PC3200 speed, but I think that's actually a limitation of the chipset, not the board itself (the same applies to the ASUS K8N I believe).
Click to expand...

This are the dimms that I am using:

http://www.ocztechnology.com/products/memory/ocz_el_ddr_pc_3200_dual_channel_platinum

I am assuming they are double sided, but I am only using 2 - 1Gb modules. I can't imagine that this would cause the chipset to read PC3200 dimms as PC2700.

I am going to have to check out that NB fan setup a bit more closely and report back. I will also do the same on the beta BIOS.

B33
 
B33,
Just to be sure, you are using slots 1&2 or 3&4, right? Not the color-coded slots (1&3, 2&4)... It's a little backwards, but I'm used to it coming from a K8N Neo2 Plat. The memory looks good. I haven't used OCZ myself, but nothing about their specs looks suspect to me.
 
SxyBstrd said:
B33,
Just to be sure, you are using slots 1&2 or 3&4, right? Not the color-coded slots (1&3, 2&4)... It's a little backwards, but I'm used to it coming from a K8N Neo2 Plat. The memory looks good. I haven't used OCZ myself, but nothing about their specs looks suspect to me.
Click to expand...


I am using slots 1 & 3, which MSI explicitly said to use before slots 2 & 4. So, I am using the GREEN slots, with 1 dimm in each of the 2 GREEN slots. Did I setup my memory in the wrong slots here???

Thanks
 
no no no

slots 1&2 are one dual channel (A) and 3&4 are another dual channel (B).

The reason they say to use 1&3 first only applies to people using single dimms. If you use slot one, you are using the front side of channel A. If you use slot 3, you are using the front side of channel B. This is important since using the back channel in a dual channel board with a single dimm can cause problems.
 
wrangler said:
no no no

slots 1&2 are one dual channel (A) and 3&4 are another dual channel (B).

The reason they say to use 1&3 first only applies to people using single dimms. If you use slot one, you are using the front side of channel A. If you use slot 3, you are using the front side of channel B. This is important since using the back channel in a dual channel board with a single dimm can cause problems.
Click to expand...

Wrangler + Sxybstrd,

Based on what you are saying, I should be putting (1) 1 Gb module in dimm1 (green) and (1) 1Gb module in dimm2 (purple) to be running at dual channel mode. This makes sense, however, in the manual:

From left to right , dimms 1 -4 ,

Channel A (dimm1 + dimm3): Green
Channel B (dimm2 + dimm4): Purple

Which, now that I read the thing a little more closely, another chart points out that a that 2 Double Sided modules on both dimm1 and dimm3 (both green) would be running at DDR333. Durrrr!!! But I suppose by looking at it as in order to run dual channel mode (ie. 2 channels) I would need to be using Channel A and Channel B, hence dual channel.

The other thing that got me in the manual was this:

*Always insert the memory modules into the GREEN slots first and it is strongly recommended NOT to insert the memory modules into the PURPLE slots while the GREEN slots are left empty.

Doesn't that sound to read as if I should populate both green dimms BEFORE I start putting modules into the PURPLE dimms?? Maybe?

Ok. This is good news! Thanks for your good observation and for helping me make sense of this. I am sooo used to my good 'ol DFI board where you put your dual channel dimms on one color (ie.the orange slots) or the yellow slots, and not the other way around. Forigve my sounding like a nOObness extreme.

Thanks! :p
 
No worries. This board is different than pretty much every other one I've used in that respect (except for the other MSI I had). You have to read the manual very carefully to get it right and even then you probably wonder if it's just a translation error. I mean, the colors should match, right? ;-)
 
laugh.gif
 
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