MSI P45 Diamond LGA 775 Intel P45 ATX Intel Motherboard

Pros: Works great. Lots of overclocking options for when i need them. water cooling built in but not needed for use unless overclocking. DDR3!

Cons: My XMS Corsair 1333 8GB of ram is running at 1066 for some reason.

Overall Review: Gforce gtx 280 1gb, Intel core 2 quad 2.66, 8 GB Ram, 1100W PS.

Pros: Features seemed nice on paper.

Cons: Took forever to get memory timings to work correctly for this board, when they finally did work, the factory installed water block on the MB, leaked at the seal and fried the board. I checked, double checked then triple checked for leaks on all hoses, they were fine, 100% but then the seal on the mobo waterblock leaks everywhere, shoddy craftmanship.

Overall Review: Go for the Asus Maximus if you want water cooling on the mobo, stay away from this product. Going through the lengthy RMA now, but this thing says replacement only on the 30 day warranty, and I really dont want another one of these junk boards.

Pros: Easy to install, very nice layout, helpful manual, comes with all the goodies you could ask for, perfect for someone trying for the first time to put together a machine without someone else's help (me).

Cons: The Intel Matrix Storage Tech. doesn't support Linux as far as I can tell (it says so explicitly in multiple places in the documentation).

Overall Review: I am not using the liquid cooling aspect of this. I will probably throw one in eventually, but this board has been a fun experiment for me, if not an incredibly frustrating one when it came to getting the drivers for the RAID tech. to work, first with windows, and now even moreso with Linux.

Pros: The alleged features and layout seem to be well thought out. The manual is easy to read and the packaging is high quality.

Cons: MSI has to be one of the worst companies that I have dealt with since I built my first system in 1986. I received two motherboards and both were DOA. Kudos to Newegg for their excellent service and keeping me informed during the RMA process. That makes a world of difference between a great company and a poor one. Only took 13 days in total for the whole RMA process.

Overall Review: It took forever to get someone to respond to my RMA request at MSI. I shipped the board immediately and it took over a month to get it back with no communication. I purposefully placed my own jumper switches,CPU cover and plastic wrapping. When I received the mobo, absolutely nothing had changed except that they shoved it into an old worn out box with no padding. No explanation of what they had done and nothing was fixed. I am Systems Engineer with almost 10 years of experience. This is no way to run a business.

Pros: The box is pretty.

Cons: This board has been a problem since day one. First we installed Vista 64 and bam, hardware failure. Removed a stick of ram, Vista ran horrible, no crossfire, hot cpu. Bought Vista 32, installation worked well, but no crossfire. Flashed Bios with recommended update from MSI live, yippie fried the board! Buy this board if you enjoy smashing your head against a wall in fustration.

Overall Review: Msi, thanks I have never seen a board die so fast.

Pros: Good board and since you can now find better deals on DDR3 RAM this is not a big drawback anymore. I am just starting to use it but have not run into any difficulties so far.

Cons: Bios update was a real pain and cost me a few hours. I am now using Linux (Opensuse 11.1) but deliberately started it with Windows to upgrade to the latest Bios 1.5 first. This was a real pain and I used a couple of 4-letter words directed to MSI until I finally made it work. I was in the end forced to temporarily install an old floppy disk drive to make it work. Hey MSI, how about making the bios upgrade process a bit easier? The Live-Online update did not work at all and crashed every time. It would also be great if MSI would finally release their UEFI upgrade (Click Bios) for this board. On their website they promised the release for August 2008. It is now March 2009! This alone deserve a 3-star rating only. I don't think the manual is great, to the contrary. Asus does a much better job on those. Price rather high.

Overall Review: Nice package, but I would prefer a better manual. I am not using water-cooling and have not decided yet if this makes sense at all.

Pros: Seems to have a lot of OC features. Good built-in cooper cooling. Comes with XFi Sound Card. Decent manual. PCB material is above standard (doesn't bend easily - like when you are installing a cpu hsf with the cursed intel push-pins). DDR3 ... and black color (not purple like some other brand). An easy access clear-cmos button is in the I/O panel, so you can just push that instead of opening the case most of the time =) LEDs throughout the board tell you where the system is stuck at during POST; might help with OC efforts. And of course - lots of tweaking options for maximum OC.

Cons: "Water-cooling" for NB is questionable. I actually took the water cooler head off and installed a small fan...heh. HW OC jumpers a pain to work with (didn't work too well for me, ended up using BIOS a lot). The jumpers (two of them) are right underneath the first PCIE, in between the two PCIE slots- so if you do crossfire, forget about accessing them. Frustrating to OC at first as it seemed to be limiting my OC efforts. CMOS clear jumpers are in weird place also. Essentially by the battery, squished in between capacitors and PCIE-1 slots. Hard to get to with big fingers =) WARNING - BIOS UPDATE WAS A PAIN - the bios file is over 4MB in size, so you'll need access to an HD to flash it after you boot from floppy. Luckily I had an old HD that I formatted as FAT so I can see it after the boot. (not sure if you can get an USB thumb-drive to be accessible with a DOS boot disk). A little on the expensive side as well... I'd serious recommend you look at the Asus model also..

Overall Review: Make sure you update your BIOS right away, especially if you plan on doing any OC (why else would you spend the cash for this board?). I spent two days messing around and couldn't get where I wanted (e5200 to 4Ghz). Then I flashed the BIOS to 1.5 and bam... no issue after some serious tweaking. I am typing this review as my e5200 is running Prime 95... without issue so far, for about 4 hours... steady at 60C on full load. Not too bad.... overall I think this board could have been an above average winner. But the cons drag it down to near average. 3 Egg.

Pros: Quick setup and booted up and ran through install very smoothly. Liquid cooling option is nice. Very nice soundcard comes with it. Board is spaced out well, easy to plug everything in.

Cons: Boots up very slowly, quick boot is enabled. I will probably RMA this board just because of that. This is compared to a 790i ultra mobo in my other machine, mobo is basically the only difference between systems. The power switch pins are on the bottom of the board, which using an Antec 900 creates a problem. I could barely reach the power switch pin, this is an Antec problem though. Tried to cross-fire HD3870s on the this board and couldn't get it work. Using an HD4870 now and seems to be running ok. Ran AoC this morning and was getting some lag with setting on high; will be checking some other games tonight, Age of Conflict, Assassin's Creed, etc. RAM is not so good though, going to RMA that today. Using Corsair 4gb xm3, latency is bad at 9. This board/OS doesn't support more than 2 gb of 7 latency RAM very well. That could be my lag issue. Also, reviews are showing the X48 is faster than the P45 and the X48 performs better with Cross-fire.

Overall Review: With the GTX 260 at $300 an SLI setup sounds more appealing than crossfire. This is an easy board to setup and runs well. DDR3 RAM is sketchy right now unless you spend some serious money. Setup: E8400 Wolfsdale processor, MSI P45 Diamond mobo, Corsair xms3 RAM 2gb (1 stick), HD4870, Corsair PSU 750W, Antec 900 case, Vista 64