Official MSI P7N Diamond (780i) Discussion/Review/Overclock/Guide/BIOS Thread

[Fiskbit]

I got a private message asking for how I fixed the SATA drivers issue, so I figure I may as well post it here so others can benefit. This thread has instructions on how to install the 790i SATA drivers. Install those and everything should work fine from then on.

XavierMaxx: Good to hear you're getting things working right! What kind of card are you going to be running in SLI?

I've been fiddling around more. I removed one of my cards and ran 3DMark06 and Crysis. I noticed no slowdown in Crysis and I recorded a score of 12,979 in 3DMark06 (5391 SM2.0, 5489 HDR/SM3.0, 4123 CPU). Upon adding the second card back in and getting everything installed, I ran 3DMark06 again while forcing AFR2 and got 14,428 (5319, 7096, 4128). I got a slightly lower score than with only 1 card installed when letting the application itself decide what to use.

[loonym]

Nice findings XavierMaxx, thanks for the post
Nvidia chipsets are notorious for their heat output. I was amazed when I pulled the circu-pipe early on and saw what MSI qc apparently thinks passes for good TIM and heatsink contact. There was this extremely hard purple compound that looked sort of like dried epoxy. It was very difficult to clean from the chips and sinks. On the mosfet area there was a typical rubbery thermal pad that only showed partial contact from 1/2 the fets. That was discarded. I coated everything with a liberal dose of ceramique and after tweaking the pipe unit a little so it sits flat, I put it back together.I use a small fan on the nb as well as the mosfet area. Unfortunately there's no software that will read these board temps but I feel much better having done all that.

[loonym]

Fiskbit, 3d06 probably doesn't scale as well with sli as most games and you may as you said be cpu limited. You will of course as you know see 06 scores rise significantly with higher cpu clocks. You keep mentioning crysis which got my interest since that game should scale well with sli. Are you running the time demo bench? I almost thinking no since you mentioned that you 'notice' no slow down. It might be useful to you to try crysis bench and maybe some other fps time demo benches that record frames if you think your sli isn't working as it should.

[Fiskbit]

I've tried the game's benchmarks as well as just testing various parts of the game in normal gameplay conditions with the framerate displayed. There is no consistent change in framerate in either case. I'm not too worried about this at the moment, as I'll be doing some overclocking within a month or two. If I don't see any sort of substantial change at that point, I'll become more concerned.

Regarding temperatures, I've been using SpeedFan and it has a few temperatures I can't identify. I think Temp1 is some sort of motherboard temperature, but I'm really unsure. It idles around 32 C. I have no idea what Temp2 is, and it idles around 47 C. I'm assuming Core (73 C) is one of my GPUs, and then there's one labeled Ambient that idles at 56 C and most certainly is not the ambient temperature. Any idea what these might be?

Do you recommend reseating the cooling components on the board, then? I've not been too concerned about built up heat there because my case has two 25cm fans that blow on the motherboard and harddrives, and the northbridge heatsink doesn't seem to get uncomfortably warm. If it's badly seated enough that reseating will lower temperatures noticeable, though, I may as well.

[panheimer]

loonym, sorry to bother you again, but how did you put a fan on the nb? i've also have a TRUE in push pull, so on one side of the circu pipe is the heatsink fan, while on the other side is the back of vga card and can't imagine a way to push some fresh air on the nb. do you have any pics of your rig?
My SB is getting very hot theese days, (my room has 33° C) and reaches as high as 65° C while playing games in SLI. The strange thing is that the sb temp reading seems to be linked with the 2nd GPU as it goes up and down according to the GPU ambient reading with a margin of 2°C difference. Is there any way to active cool the sb? i've tried to put a small 40mm fan on it, but there are not enough space under the vga cooler.
i've also tought to replace the circupipe with HR05ifx, i've got two of them, one SLI version and one normal, bot neither one fit between the two 8800 ultras.

[XavierMaxx]

Fiskbit: Thanks for the words of support, we need all we can get with this board. I'll be running 8800GTS-512s like yourself, albeit BFG instead of EVGA. Can't really go wrong with either brand. I'm anticipating more issues when I do it so like yourself I am tackling them one at a time.

I agree with loonym that 3DMark06 doesn't always seem to scale well with SLI, or at least that's what I've seen in my research. Likewise, though, Crysis should show some noticeable gain. Most people point to drivers in cases like yours but I'm a bit more old school and would say check the hardware instead; I know, for example, that one solution over at the MSI Forums for SLI instability on this board was to use just 1 SLI connector.

I also have read that our cards tend to automatically slacken, even in SLI, if temps get a bit unwieldly. I'm not sure if this is true but I can tell you that my single 8800GTS hits 62C core load on this board and you generally want to stay below 80C. I use Rivatuner to boost the fan speed manually on startup. The GPU temps show up in Everest quite readily and obviously.

loonym: I'm glad I'm not alone, and I know all about cooling mods...I've just been a more relaxed OCer in recent times so I need to get my feet wet again. I will say without a doubt that a lot of the problems I see on MSI Forums with OCs and stability are no doubt linked to the two problems I had. I can say with certainty now after runnin OCCT overnight that indeed I overcame that second hurdle. Your perseverance in this thread and at the MSI Forums is much appreciated by the community.

[loonym]

I put the small fan (50mm) on the side of the big nb sink right behind the vid card and simply used a couple zipties to hold it. There's plenty enough room for a small fan. I love fans so I have 'em everywhere I can think of. I don't have any measuring equipment and I don't know of any software that will measure the temps I'm interested in like the pwm area and the nb so there's no way to tell if any of my efforts paid off or not but it's just something I do with all my setups. I simply don't trust the consistancy or quality of factory installs whether it's vid cards, mobos or whatever, even though some are rather good upon inspection. As far as the southbridge goes I've never really worried about that temp too much since I only apply 1 notch over stock voltage but I think if that cover was gone off it I could manage to squeeze a tiny fan there too, in between the cards it looks like enough space. I'm redoing my install, hopefully this weekend, in an Xclio WTBK Advanced, which btw I notice is the same case Fiskbit is using. I'm going to be using my current sunbeam full tower for a P45 cruncher I'm building. I want to try one of those $99 MSI P45 Neo-f boards. I'll take some pics then. I'm a little embarrassed about the state of my cable and fan management at this point Very sloppy

[XavierMaxx]

Zipties: man of my own heart. I've used them to rig all sorts of cooling that defied physics. I'm happy at 3.2 but trying 3.4 for fun, and I can see my vDroop is getting huge now, so I will probably have to do something about the MOSFET cooling. I agree with the statement that you can't trust the manufacturer's cooling solutions, at least in regard to thermal interface, and I have a proud tradition of modifying them since my NF7-S days and perhaps even as far back as my MSI KT333 boards. As far as cable management goes, lol, let's just say my attention to such things is proportionate to the visibility - and I don't have a window.

I haven't had time to fully inspect the cooling on this board yet but I don't see why zipties wouldn't work, although I have used Arctic Silver epoxy in the past (nasty stuff). I find that modifying retail cooling products is often the best way to handle this situation. For example, and this is on the extreme end, I removed and covered metal from a Vantec PCI dual-fan cooler so I could mount it vertically next to a CPU heatsink and northbridge (air going from RAM side to their side). It brought down temps a good 10C, and it wasn't too expensive. It also stayed in place with only mild tying.

[Fiskbit]

loonym: I really like my XClio case, but am still disappointed by a few aspects of it. The hard drive bay design is pretty poor; they made the back ends of the hard drives face the side for easy port access, but this leaves little room between the edge of the case and the ports. My power supply had 3 SATA power cables on a single bundled cord, which would have worked great here were it not for the amount they'd have to be bent to get them to fit. I ended up having to use some Molex->SATA power converters due to fear of cords breaking from bending too much.

The toolless design on the front drive bays is pretty awful. The rails, at least in mine, are neon green (yet a review I saw showed black rails!). They stick out the front for 'easy' removal of drives, and installing drives with just screws looks like it'd be very hard. I always remove toolless hardware when I can because I don't trust them compared to screws, and I remain irritated by how bad the toolless design is here and how ugly it is.

Aside from that, the case is awesome. I'm a little disappointed by the fan noise (I expected the massive fans to be a lot quieter) and wish the LEDs could be turned off without turning off the fans, but the front temperature readout is great and it cools like a beast. Definitely a nice case.

XavierMaxx: I just upped my 8800 GTS fan speed to 50% (700RPM) using the NVidia control panel. You say you change fan speed on startup, so it sounds like you do this a lot. Doing it with the NVidia control panel should make it permanent. What temperature do you idle at? Mine is now down to about 60 C for GPU1. GPU2 stayed very cool even before I messed with the fan, always being in the upper 50s. I don't really know anything about acceptable GPU temperatures.

Since I have a floppy drive and IDE DVD drive, I need to get some new rounded cables to replace the ribbon cables. The cords in my case are all zip-tied, as well, and the ribbon cables are so bulky and block so much air!

[XavierMaxx]

You can have up to three temperature readings for each video card: GPU, memory, and ambient. It's possible you are only reading GPU and ambient, though, and for the most part you only need the former. More or less I consider 80C a limit for load temperatures all the way back to my GeF3 Ti-500, as the dense silicon in video cards starts to get twitchy around 75C in my experience. Generally I experienced stability and/or performance issues when my cards starting hitting 80C.

Idle isn't as important but for your reference, mine idles at 43C with this board (42C on my last). Load, again, is 62C (55C with my old board), which I consider more than reasonable, although I would tolerate up to 70-75C personally as long as I was confident the ambient wouldn't spike. I kept my fan speed at 75% on my old system, and 86% on this one (to compensate for the higher temperature inherit with this motherboard). In the past I generally determined the optimal manual setting by measuring (with RivaTuner or similar) the fan speed when it is on auto through a long gaming session (1 hr). Whatever % the fan was at when temperatures reached equilibrium with it, I used as a baseline and added % until the load temps were reasonable.

As is implied by my information above, I have found this motherboard to have a higher general ambient heat than most so it is important to adjust your cooling to meet the need. I often find that even the little things can make a big difference, depending on the source of heat build-up. Certainly I suggest active cooling on any motherboard bridges near a video card and I always override the auto fan settings.

[bluspikez]

Not sure if you guys sorted your SLi problems, but here is what I did to see an improvement in 3DMark06. What you need to do is go into the nvidia control panel and force some settings for the 3dmark app. Specifically, I needed to set the SLi render mode to something other than nvidia recommended to see any performance increase (have it on alternate frame rendering 2 right now for 3dmark). Doing that gave me a very noticable performance increase. I couldn't say exactly what it was since I was also overclocking the CPU. That being said, 3dmark06 is very CPU dependent. When I had my CPU at around 3.8ghz, my score was over 17k. With CPU at stock speeds (3ghz) it was something closer to 14k or 15k (don't really remember which).

As for all my other games, I have not had to force the SLi mode to get both of my cards to render the scene; all of them just work with the nvidia recommended settings. One way to check this in Crysis (since you mentioned that game) is to hit the tilde key (~) to open the console while you are playing and to type "r_displayinfo 1" (without quotes of course). In the top right hand side of the screen a bunch of information will be displayed. If it says "MGPU" or "Multiple GPU" in there somewhere, your SLi is working correctly. For me, with everything on very high (cept for antialiasing) at 1280x1024 I get around 30-50fps in Crysis.

Hope that helps out. If any of you still have problems with the SLi settings, I can try to help, just PM me. I spent quite a bit of time messing around with settings to get them tweaked to my liking.

[nugzo]

After seeing a few people with promising results, and loonyms positive comments i've decided to try this board again. This is my only choice besides the EVGA 790i if i want 3way SLI and room for an additional pci-e sound card. Since i already have a bunch of DDR2 i decided to go this route. If it doesn't work out I'll sell it in a custom build. My board came in today but i wont have time to test it until tomorrow. I've had great success with overclcking the reference and asus versions of the 680i and 780i chipset boards. I hope i can master this one as well. Quick question... What is the difference between the p series bios and the regular numerical? (ie p07 or 1.22) and what is the recommended bios now. the 1.22? Thanks. I'll post my experiences tomorrow after tackling this monster. I'll be using all of the hardware in my sig.

[XavierMaxx]

I have seen people face difficulty getting 8GB to cooperate with this board, but I'm sure that's true of many boards and might just require further perseverance. I'm assuming that you would be moving your signature's system to the P7N Diamond, though. The P series BIOS is geared towards performance and, as is mentioned on the first post in this thread, is based on 1.1B6. I personally would remain with 1.2B1 as it has worked well for me and 1.2B2 still lacks notes as far as I know. If I had to guess, though, I'd say 1.2B2 is probably an attempt to fix lingering 780i video corruption issues.

[nugzo]

I have seen people face difficulty getting 8GB to cooperate with this board, but I'm sure that's true of many boards and might just require further perseverance. I'm assuming that you would be moving your signature's system to the P7N Diamond, though. The P series BIOS is geared towards performance and, as is mentioned on the first post in this thread, is based on 1.1B6. I personally would remain with 1.2B1 as it has worked well for me and 1.2B2 still lacks notes as far as I know. If I had to guess, though, I'd say 1.2B2 is probably an attempt to fix lingering 780i video corruption issues.

Yes i will be moving my hardware to this board, but slowly. Ill be using 1 video card and 4gigs of ram on the bench to start. If by the end of the day i cant come close to what im running now then i'll probably not put to much more effort in to it. It all depends on how i progressed. I'm not looking to beat my current config but i wont settle for anything less. I'll start by removing the heatpipes and applying better TIM. If i can reach the same OC with the 1 video card and 4 gigs then ill add the rest of the hardware and go from there. I have a feeling that 8GB issues are tRFC related as per the OCZ article. If i can get a comfortable and stable OC with the 4gigs then i'll look in to having the tRFC values changed to accommodate 8gb. Hopefully g-skill can help if not i think i can use SPDtool to re-write the SPD. On auto with my Striker tRFC is at 54 though so maybe i wont have to.

[nugzo]

Anybody seen the P7N2 Diamond anywhere yet?

http://www.dvhardware.net/article26794.html
http://www.msi.eu/news/press/2008/PR...2-Diamond.html
http://www.futuremark.com/news/53005...d_motherboard/

This guy says he already has one but i cant find them for sale anywhere.
http://www.asktheramguy.com/v3/showthread.php?t=70183

[XavierMaxx]

Well it does seem people have had better luck with overclocking C2Ds on this board than the quads, but there are definitely some quirks and nuances to this board that can simply be hit by an unlucky setting. I do have to use Memtest to get stable as I mentioned in one of my prior posts (runs on startup), although not for tRFC; for reference, the BIOS auto setting seems to result in 68T for my memory. I'm only using 4GB, though, but I do agree with your intuition about the 8GB problem being related to timings somehow. I am glad we have tools at our disposal to improve our chances with relatively immature hardware, certainly helped me out on this one.

[nugzo]

Ok she's on the bench Installing Vista 64. Be back soon with updates....

[nugzo]

Ok she's on the bench Installing Vista 64. Be back soon with updates....

[XavierMaxx]

Ah lucky catch on my part, checked the thread right after your post - good luck with that and let us know how it goes.

As for my results, 3.4 seems unattainable for one reason or another, I suspect it will require fine-tuning like 3.2 did. Boosting CPU voltage past a point does nothing for stability (~25 min OCCT) and same with NB voltage, so I assume either I need more FSB term (I do need more than 1.25 for 3.2) than the board can deliver currently or I will have to do some GTL tweaks. I have a FSB hole between 3.2 and 3.4 at 9x, and 1600+ seems unstable at any setting, so that remains my best bet unless I tweak up to find the edge of the hole (I expect ~3.25).

[nugzo]

Ok so far so good. After about 45minutes of playing she's running at the same speeds as my ASUS striker II Formula. I still only have 1 video card in and 4 gigs of ram. I ran about 15min of small fft and was ok then i stopped it to run memory tests and super pi. I just started Prime back up in this screenshot. I will let it run while i run back to the shop and pick up my sound card. The temps are high ATM because my TRUE isnt mounted correctly. The backplate is still on my striker so it s not mounted tight at all. Heres the SS.

[XavierMaxx]

Looks pretty good. Gives me a clear idea of your system characteristics.

I see that you have the Sidebar so I assume you are running Vista, especially since the screenshot border is using the default snipping tool stroke. I mention that because Super PI crashes on me and I've heard it is a Vista compatibility issue (although I did not bother to try XP compatibility mode now that I think about it). It might be an x64 issue, too, but I'd assume with 4 or 8GB you are running that as well. Do you know anything about that?

I see that your GPU core is 60C idle there, that is what I would consider borderline for idle (you want 50-55C auto and 40-45C manual) but it is likely due to automatic fan control. I am curious as to what you hit under serious load, my expectation is that it will be at least low 70s and as high as 80+. The automatic fan control probably only hits about 50% at that point, so a manual setting of 86% like I use on this board would net you closer to 65C or so.

Everything else looks great...hope it works out for you under more testing, this board needs more users to fully probe its strengths and weaknesses.

[nugzo]

OK 45 more min woth of prime with no errors. I just added the other 4GB of ram and still doing well. 8gb at 933 5-5-5-15. This is the same as the striker. I havent even tried to tweak this system yet just wanted to se if it could hang. I apears that it can. I'll now install the board in the case and continue. I'm using the 1.1b2 bios and loonyms bios settings here where he was calling me out for downing this board. Thanks Loon! The only things i changed were the vcore and NOT setting the SLI memory to expert. Heres a SS of the 8GB of Gskill.

[nugzo]

Looks pretty good. Gives me a clear idea of your system characteristics.

I see that you have the Sidebar so I assume you are running Vista, especially since the screenshot border is using the default snipping tool stroke. I mention that because Super PI crashes on me and I've heard it is a Vista compatibility issue (although I did not bother to try XP compatibility mode now that I think about it). It might be an x64 issue, too, but I'd assume with 4 or 8GB you are running that as well. Do you know anything about that?

I see that your GPU core is 60C idle there, that is what I would consider borderline for idle (you want 50-55C auto and 40-45C manual) but it is likely due to automatic fan control. I am curious as to what you hit under serious load, my expectation is that it will be at least low 70s and as high as 80+. The automatic fan control probably only hits about 50% at that point, so a manual setting of 86% like I use on this board would net you closer to 65C or so.

Everything else looks great...hope it works out for you under more testing, this board needs more users to fully probe its strengths and weaknesses.

On the striker with all 3 cards installed full load is 60-68c with fan set to manual on 80%. Of course the middle card always shows the hottest. The ss earlier the fan is set to auto. I havent touched any of that stuff yet. Yes i'm using vista 64 SP1. I havent heard of or had issues with super pi in vista 64. I haven't used it much though.

[XavierMaxx]

On the striker with all 3 cards installed full load is 60-68c with fan set to manual on 80%. Of course the middle card always shows the hottest. The ss earlier the fan is set to auto. I havent touched any of that stuff yet. Yes i'm using vista 64 SP1. I havent heard of or had issues with super pi in vista 64. I haven't used it much though.

Was just checking as I know Fiskbit was having some issues with SLI and/or GPU temperatures, thank you for clarifying that. Your temp results look spot-on so that helps provide a good benchmark for determining if anybody is having overheating issues on auto. My card definitely runs hotter with this board, I imagine it has to do with the chipset more than anything; glad to see it wasn't my imagination. Guess I'll have to look into my Super PI issue some more...it makes me nervous, lol...although I passed a 2-hr run of CPU-focused OCCT last night plus loops of PCMark Vantage overnight without a problem.

[Fiskbit]

Well, I wasn't having issues with temperatures, per se; I just didn't have the fan speed upped. I'm running them at 50% for the colder card and 60% for the hotter card. Current temps are 56 and 60 C, but case ambient is 5 or 6 degrees higher than usual because it's a hot day.

I had to do a complete reinstall of windows last night and will be looking at SLI again soon. Perhaps things will run more smoothly this time.