Overclocking Results:

stock max. oc motherboard speed: 333 mhz 478 mhz if you're new to Overclocking and not sure what to do, check out these two excellent Guides for some pointers: Overclocking the CPU and Memory Overclocking the Videocard

The nVIDIA nForce 680i was the overclocking leader till Intel released its P35 chipset, it will still be interesting to overclock the MSI P6N Diamond motherboard of course. It will be equipped with an Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 processor and 2GB of Corsair's DOMINATOR Twin2X2048-8888C4DF memory. Before the overclocking began though the CPU clock multiplier was set to 6x and the memory to DDR2-667 MHz mode.

Starting at 333 MHz the FSB was increased in 5 MHz increments. The MSI P6N Diamond turned out to be a decent overclocker and reached 400 MHz without any problems. At 420 MHz FSB the motherboard started to show some signs of instability and the Northbridge voltage was increased to 1.4V. That can happen at 420 pretty easily... ;-)

At 460 MHz FSB the motherboard again started to have problems loading Windows, so I increased the Northbridge voltage again, this time to 1.5V. That allowed the MSI P6N Diamond motherboard to reach a maximum speed of 478 MHz, anything higher and the board would not be stable enough to run benchmarks.

Not a bad overclock overall, and certainly fast enough for you to push your computer components to the max. Yet, it's not quite up to Intel's high standard.

The MSI BIOS:

In the Advance DRAM Configuration menu, MSI gives you the regular memory timing adjustments as well as a few more advanced features for the P6N Diamond.

The P6N Diamond can adjust its FSB from 1333-2500 MHz (333-625 MHz) in 1 MHz increments. You can adjust the CPU clock multiplier as well as the PCI-E frequency. Maximum CPU voltage goes 0.3875V above stock, memory up to 2.8V, Northbridge to 1.5V and Southbridge to 1.55V.

Prelude to Benchmarks

The details of how the MSI P6N Diamond motherboard test system was configured for benchmarking, including the specific hardware, software drivers, operating system and benchmark versions are indicated below. In the second column are the general specs for the reference platforms this nVIDIA nForce 680i based system is to be compared against. Please take a moment to look over PCSTATS test system configurations before moving on to the individual benchmark results.

PCSTATS Test System Configurations

test system reference system #1 reference system #2 processor: intel Core 2 Duo E6750 Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (775) AMD Athlon64 X2 5000+ (AM2) Clock Speed: 8 x 333 = 2.66 GHz 9 x 266 MHz = 2.4 GHz 13 x 200 MHz = 2.6 GHz Motherboard: MSI P6N Diamond (NF 680i SLI) Gigabyte GA-X38-DQ6 (X38 Express) ECS PN2 SLI2+ (NF 680i SLI) Foxconn 975X7AB-8EKRS2H (975X) Biostar TForce P965 DLX (P965 Express) Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 (P965 Express) Foxconn P9657AA-8KS2H (P965 Express) MSI P965 Platinum (P965 Express) Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 (P965 Express) Gigabyte GA-P35-DQ6 (P35 Express) MSI P35 Platinum (P35 Express) Biostar TP35D3-A7 Deluxe (P35 Express) ASRock AM2V890-VSTA (VIA K8T890) Albatron KM51PV-AM2 (GF6150) MSI K9N SLI Platinum (NF 570 SLI) Asus M2-CROSSHAIR (NF 590 SLI) Videocard: MSI NX7800GTX-VT2D256E Memory: 2x 1024MB Corsair DOMINATOR Twin2X2048-8888C4DF (DDR2) 2x 1024MB Corsair DOMINATOR Twin3X2048-1800C7D (DDR3) Hard Drive: 74GB Western Digital Raptor WD740 CDROM: AOpen Combo 52x Power Supply: PC Power & Cooling TurboCool 510 SLI Heatsink: Intel E6600 Reference AMD Athlon64 FX-62 Reference Software Setup: Microsoft WindowsXP SP2 Intel INF 7.22 nVIDIA Forceware 91.47 Microsoft WindowsXP SP2 nVIDIA Forceware 9.35 nVIDIA Forceware 91.47 Benchmarks: SYSMark 2004 PC Worldbench 5.0 Super Pi SiSoft Sandra 2005 PCMark05 3DMark05 3DMark06 FarCry Doom 3 Quake 4