14 DAY TRIAL // As Intel is supposed to soon launch its high end, high performance chipset X38, a number of important mainboard manufacturing companies including Gigabyte, Asus, BioStar and MSI announced product lines based on that chipset. The top of the line MSI product is called Diamond and the company waits for Intel to start shipping the chipsets in order to proceed to the mass production phase. As the mainboard is ready from the design point of view, all it takes to see it in retail stores are just a few more BIOS tweaks and of course a lot of shipped Intel chipsets.
The MSI X38 Diamond motherboard's main innovative feature is its silent and passive cooling system made of solid copper heat pies and fins which is named Circu-pipe and which comes in two varieties, one with a huge loop and a more discrete variant as well. Thanks to its chipset, the mainboard will offer support for just about all Intel Core 2 central processing units, including the upcoming 45 nanometer Wolfdale and Yorkfield processors and it will sport no less than four DDR3 compatible memory slots which are said to reach up to 1600MHz and beyond with a little tweaking.
As Serial ATA hard disk drives are very common and popular these days, the Diamond comes with six such ports as well as two external SATA connectors that will prove most helpful to users who need to connect some external storage devices. On the graphics side, the Diamond motherboard will come with four PCI Express 2.0 x16 slots that are Double Crossfire ready; for all your networking needs, two Gigabit Ethernet ports are available too. Bundled together with the MSI Diamond will come a PCI Express x1 compatible X-Fi sound card, even if the board also integrates a 7.1 audio chip.
On the legacy side, the new MSI addition will also feature one Parallel ATA port and one PCI slot for all users still keeping to those old hardware components. When it comes to pricing, there is no news just yet, but the manufacturing company said that it would announce the price tag as soon as Intel officially launches the X38 chipset. While this line of mainboards comes with passive cooling solutions, it is reported by the news site ttcmagazine that MSI also prepares a water cooled version for improved stability under heavy workloads.