MSI P35 Diamond Mobo Tested

Bit-Tech published a review of MSI's P35 Diamond motherboard which comes with a bundle of extras and also supports DDR3 instead of DDR2. Here's a bit:

The MSI P35 Diamond performs well but isn't exceptional and the additional extras are a welcome effort but might not appeal to everyone. I constantly found myself writing "disappointed" here and there, which I still am - it just doesn't live up to what we'd expect from a Diamond-series board - especially since I've seen what the X38 Diamond has in potential. At most it's an expensive Platinum and makes the real P35 Platinum a far better purchase than when we originally reviewed it.

There should have been more effort put into the core bundle since you're buying the best P35 motherboard MSI makes - and while the X-Fi and SkyTel are certainly part of a reflection of this, it's just not all there and doesn't mean you can't buy the same X-Fi card for £25 anyway. Without these two extras you might as well be buying the P35 Platinum with expensive DDR3 slots because the core motherboard is lacking extra features. How about at least another Gigabit Ethernet or some WiFi? A reorganised SATA port array? I still detest the use of internal SATA for the more infrequently used eSATA, and wish MSI wouldn't permanently sacrifice ports in this way. Offering an eSATA Matrix RAID 1 array is good, but those who will use this function is low and it only needs at most one eSATA port.

Overall it shouldn't detract that this is still a good board with fantastic stability and great performance, but it still doesn't represent good value for money. If you're really pinning over DDR3 and to splash out this kind of cash on a motherboard - wait for the X38 Diamond. Or, if you can't wait that long, we'd suggest you save some money and get some fast DDR2, the separate X-Fi card and the P35 Platinum for essentially the same result.