MSI P35 Diamond

Testing Methods:

All of our benchmarks have been engineered to give you numbers that you are likely to find useful when actually using the products we have evaluated in the real world.

We are also focusing a lot more of our time on evaluating the stability of the motherboards (and platforms) using a stress test designed to highlight any of the potential weaknesses that the product may have. That involves a gradually increasing amount of stress starting with Prime95 on all cores and expanding to looping 3DMark 06 if all is well. This is to ensure that all parts of the system are stressed simultaneously over a period of time.

We believe that the consumer is never likely to subject their platform to this level of stress and we are not expecting every product to complete an entire extended stress test. However, most poorly engineered products fail within the first couple of hours, or even minutes, allowing us to make a conscious decision on whether a motherboard (or platform) is worth your money, regardless of how well it performs in our benchmarks.

Test Setup:

Systems:

• MSI P35 Diamond;
  Asus P5K3 Deluxe;
  Asus P5K3 Premium;

Unfortunately we weren't able to run the MSI at the usual 1,333MHz at 7-7-7-20 DDR3 memory speed - the BIOS would only accept either 1,066MHz at 7-7-7-20 or 1,333MHz at SPD which turned out to be a slower 8-8-8-20 instead. We tried all sorts of memory that are rated to perform far in excess of 1,333MHz and we've had them running on other machines successfully at these speeds.

In addition - MSI does not specifically stipulate the board is CrossFire capable, even though we were able to run CrossFire on it like any other P35 board, these results are ultimately not taken into account in the final performance score.