MSI has announced two new motherboards based on Nvidia's nForce 780i SLI and nForce 750i SLI chipsets. Both of them support Intel's Core 2 Extreme/Quad/Duo processors with FSB 1333MHz, dual channel DDR2-1066/800/667 memory, and Nvidia's 3-way SLI. Both of these motherboards will be cooled by MSI's Circu-Pipe heatpipe cooling design.

The first one, branded MSI P7N Diamond, is based on Nvidia's nForce 780i SLI chipset with four PCI Express slots x16 slots, two of them at PCIe 2.0 x16, one at PCIe 1.0 x16 and one at PCIe 1.0 x8. Besides the PCIe x16 slots the Diamond version also has two PCI Express x1 slots and one plain PCI slot. As for the storage options, the Diamond version comes with six SATA II ports with support for RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 5 and two additional eSATA ports supplied by JMicron JMB363 chip. The sound is done over Creative SB X-Fi Xtreme add-in card for 7.1 HD audio. Other specifications include dual Ethernet, Firewire, two ATA133 connectors, six USB 2.0 ports with two on-board headers for four more, clear CMOS button and much more.

The second one, or should we say the lower priced one, is based on Nvidia's nForce 750i SLI chipset with three PCI Express x16 slots, two working at PCIe x8 mode and one at PCIe 2.0 x16 mode. This one comes with integrated audio over Realtek ALC888 chip for 7.1 channel HD audio. It has four SATA ports with support for RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 5 and two eSATA ports on the back panel. Other specs include four USB 2.0 ports with on-board header for four more, two ATA133 connectors, optional Firewire, clear CMOS button and more modest Circu-Pipe heatpipe cooling.

The European price search engine, Geizhals.at, has these two listed, and the lowest price for the 780i Diamond version is at €256.75, while the 750i SLI based Platinum sells for €123.22, but neither one of them is available.