Overclocking: Reaching 300

In the very extensive press kit we mentioned above, MSI discusses the excellent overclocking potential of the K8N Diamond Plus, and support for DDR 600 memory speeds and a 300 MHz system bus speed. We were able to fully confirm these claims, but anything beyond these limits was out of the board's reach.

With its CoreCell chip, MSI also offers a more comfortable route to overclocking than fiddling with BIOS settings. Used in combination with the CoreCenter Windows utility, it allows dynamic overclocking from within a running Windows system (albeit within more conservative limits.)

The K8N Diamond Plus does not reach the high system bus speeds of well beyond 300 MHz that can be achieved by the Asus A8N32 SLI or DFI's LANParty UT NF4 SLI. However, the overclocking options it does offer are much more flexible, as MSI allows a much wider range of settings for CPU core voltage, chipset voltage and even DDR voltage. Especially brave overclockers can even set the memory voltage to a full 4.1V with a jumper. We definitely don't recommend this, though, as it is certain to shorten the life expectancy of your memory modules quite a bit - down to a few seconds, in the worst case!