After a streak of chipset rollouts for the Intel platform, Nvidia finally has something new to excite the AMD fans-an enthusiast chipset with 3-way and hybrid SLI support, and loads of other features.

It was about time Nvidia offered a robust gaming platform to users of AMD's new Phenom processors. We tested the MSI K9N2 Diamond, powered by Nvidia's new nForce 780a SLI chipset.

FEATURES, The most striking features of the nForce 780a SLI chipset are 3-way and Hybrid SLI support. So if you have really deep pockets, you can club three 8800 GTX, 8800 Ultra, or 9800 GTX graphics cards in SLI. The chipset also features an integrated GPU, which can be paired up with a discrete GeForce 8400 GS or 8500 GT card for boosted performance.

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The motherboard supports both, the Athlon 64 and Phenom families of processors. As a part of the 'Diamond' series, this motherboard comes fully loaded with lots of features, the most striking being the Circu-pipe heat pipe design, all-solid capacitors and the inclusion of a Creative X-Fi Extreme sound card. The 780a SLI offers support for six SATA ports, one IDE port and ten USB ports. An additional IDE port and
two eSATA ports are supported by a JMicron JMB363 controller. The rear panel features one DVI, one FireWire, four USB, dual gigabit Ethernet, eSATA ports. Two additional USB ports and a FireWire port can be added using a bracket bundled with the package.

PERFORMANCE: The K9N Diamond performs smoothly like any other high-end motherboard. Since it did not make sense to overclock this board. We didn't attempt to do so. What really disappointed us was the placement of the first two PCle x16 slots-they are placed quite close to the heat sinks that installing graphics cards can be rather troublesome at times. Notice how close the Pele slots are to the heat sinks.

VERDICT. This is one mean motherboard for AMD users. Go for it.

FOR, 3-way SLI and Hybrid SLI support, feature packed.
AGAINST Bad placement of PCle x16 slots.
TESTBED

CPU: AMD Athlon 64 FX-62, 2.80 GHz Memory: 2 x 1 GB Kingston HyperX DDR21066
Graphics card: Gigabyte 8800 GT TurboForce
Hard disk: Western Digital 5000AACS