Overclocking

Following MSI tradition, K9N Diamond features dynamic overclocking technology (D.O.T.). Setting this feature your motherboard will be automatically overclocked. D.O.T. can be set in five different levels: Private (1%), Sergeant (3%), Captain (5%), Colonel (7%) and General (10%). During our review we disabled dynamic overclocking.

Besides that, on MSI K9N Diamond (1.1 BIOS) you will find the following overclocking options:

• Base clock (HTT clock): Can be adjusted from 200 to 500 MHz in 1 MHz steps.
• Main PCI Express x16 slot clock (“C51 PCI-Express Frequency”): Can be adjusted from 100 MHz to 148.4375 MHz in 1.5625 MHz steps.
• Other PCI Express slots clock (“MCP55 PCI-Express Frequency”): Can be adjusted from 100 MHz to 200 MHz in 1 MHz steps.
• CPU voltage: auto or from 1.200 V to 1.350 V in 0.025 V steps.
• Extra CPU voltage: default or 0.05 V to 0.30 V in 0.05 V steps.
• Memory voltage: 1.70 V to 2.10 V in 0.05 V plus 2.20 V and 2.30 V adjustments.
• Main PCI Express x16 slot voltage (“NB to PCIE VGA Voltage”): 1.23 V to 1.35 V in 0.04 V steps.
• Second PCI Express x16 slot voltage (“SB to PCIE VGA Voltage”): 1.50 V to 1.85 V in 0.05 V steps.
• CPU to HyperTransport link voltage: 1.20 V to 1.50 V in 0.05 V steps.
• HyperTransport voltage (“NB to SB HT”): 1.30 V, 1.34 V, 1.39 V and 1.43 V.
• LinkBoost technology (see Figure 9): An automatic overclocking technology by nVidia.
• Memory timings (see Figure 10).

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Figure 7: Overclocking options on MSI K9N Diamond (BIOS v 1.1).

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Figure 8: Overclocking options on MSI K9N Diamond (BIOS v 1.1).

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Figure 9: LinkBoost Technology on MSI K9N Diamond (BIOS v 1.1).

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Figure 10: Memory timings adjustment (BIOS v 1.1).

The PCI Express clock configuration is very important, as you can lock the PCI Express clock at a given value (100 MHz, for example). Usually when you increase the CPU base clock (HTT clock) you will automatically increase the PCI Express clock as well, and sometimes your overclocking will be limited not by the CPU but by the devices connected to the PCI Express bus. Thus with this option you can increase the probability of setting a higher overclocking. And this motherboard provides separated clock and voltage configurations for the PCI Express busses connected to the north bridge chip (i.e. the main SLI PCI Express x16 slot) and to the south bridge chip (i.e. all other PCI Express connections, including the second x16 PCI Express slot).

With this motherboard we increased the base clock of our CPU from 200 MHz to 220 MHz and the system worked just fine. We could configure our system above that, but it wasn’t stable (we only consider an overclocking successful if we can run PCMark 05 and Quake III three times without facing any problems).

The overclocking we achieved represents a 10% increase on the CPU internal clock, making our 2.6 GHz Athlon 64 X2 5000+ to run at 2.86 GHz. The performance measured by PCMark05 increased 6.06% and the performance measured by Quake III increased 25.32% with this overclocking – really impressive.

This is the same overclocking level we could achieve with Gigabyte GA-M59SLI-S5. On the  other two socket AM2 motherboard we reviewed – ASUS M2N32-SLI De Luxe and ECS KA3 MVP Extreme – we were able to go up to 221 MHz, not so different from what we got with this MSI model.

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