The BIOS and nTune support
While the K8N Diamond Plus is stacked with features and peripherals, the BIOS will have to be just as well equipped to cater to enthusiasts and overclockers.

Things start well enough, with the BIOS offering full control over a laundry list of Athlon 64 memory controller timings. There are just enough options to get you into trouble if you don't know what you're doing.

Speaking of trouble, the BIOS also has an extensive array of overclocking options. Users can crank the HyperTransport clock all the way up to 450MHz, but at those speeds, the fact that the BIOS's CPU multiplier only goes down to 8x could be a problem. That's a shame, as MSI hasn't skimped in the voltage department. CPU voltages are available as high as 2.3V, and it's possible to crank the memory up to an impressive 4.1V with an onboard jumper switch.

We've been around long enough to prefer overclocking the old fashioned way, but the K8N Diamond Plus also has a couple of automatic overclocking options for those seeking something a little simpler. Dynamic overclocking kicks in when the CPU is under load, and users can set it to increase speeds by between 1% and 15%. The BIOS also allows users to overclock select NVIDIA graphics cards by similar percentages. Most importantly, though, all automatic overclocking options are disabled by default.

Unfortunately, not all of the BIOS defaults are correct. The 1.00 revision of the BIOS incorrectly sets a slower HyperTransport link between the chipset's north and south bridge components. It's easy to bump this connection up to full speed, and MSI has corrected the problem in a beta BIOS it released to us for testing.

Moving along, the K8N Diamond Plus' BIOS offers a pretty decent array of automatic fan speed control options. Users can set temperature targets for the CPU and north bridge fans, but sadly, there's no fan speed control for the board's system fan headers. The BIOS also lacks fan failure or temperature-based shutdown and alarm conditions.

Users can get their hands on fan speed and temperature-based alarm conditions by installing MSI's CoreCenter Windows software, though.

Otherwise, CoreCenter is more of a glorified hardware monitoring app than a BIOS extension. It's possible to adjust the level of dynamic overclocking, but serious overclockers will want to stick with the BIOS, especially since the board's support for nTune is among the worst we've seen.

In addition to lacking support for nTune's hardware monitoring capabilities, the K8N Diamond Plus also lacks the hooks necessary to support the app's overclocking and memory timing controls. About the only thing you can do with nTune is adjust graphics card clock speeds, which really have nothing to do with the motherboard. I guess MSI would rather you use CoreCenter to monitor and tweak the board, but since CoreCenter doesn't match many of nTune's features and capabilities, the user ends up losing out.