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The Board

The K9N is definitely feature full as you saw from the specifications on the previous page, however pure specifications don't really give you a 'feel' for the board. Just holding and looking at the K9N I got a positive feeling about it; what can I say, the number of SATA2 ports, heatpipes, PCIe slots and backpanel impressed me.  Also, upon casual inspection, the neat layout with a few unusual twists showed a certain amount of thought was put into making this board more than just some board with just any old layout.  The question is, will the initial positive impression hold up to serious torture testing?

The first thing I noticed was the tight grouping of all the SATA connectors (shown above), along with the single IDE channel connector and the FDD connector, ATX  connector, all in one tight area.  This puts a lot of the cabling in one spot and makes case cleanup a bit easier - you'll see below that the same philosophy for the fan headers and extra 4pin PSU connector makes for a neat setup near the CPU Socket.  There's also a very handy push button for clearing the CMOS which you can see as the small red button in the picture below (VERY handy when you corrupt the CMOS with overclocking experiments by pushing too far!).  This isn't something you see everyday and I'm very pleased to find this here.

Having gone this far, I wish they had added onboard power and reset switches like DFI and Foxconn have done on their higher en, but that's just nitpicking. I was glad to see the vertical, easy to remove battery, as it makes clearing the CMOS easier on those few occasions the button is not quite enough.

The I/O panel has a full set of connectors for pretty much anything you might need.  Note the uncommon inclusion of both optical and coaxial SPDIF out.  The full I/O list of the backpanel includes:

• Two Gigabit ethernet jacks
• five analog audio jacks
• SPDIFF out
• optical out
• firewire
• serial port
• parallel port
• PS/2 keyboard and mouse
• four USB 2.0 ports!

Unlike most other motherboards these days, MSI did not choose to use color coding to indicate dual channel pairing of sockets, which I found irritating because it goes against the convention of pretty much every other board out there.

Above you can see the large but low profile aluminium heatsinks on the Nforce 570 chip. That won't interfere with even long cards!

Above is a picture of that tight cluster I mentioned, of the two four pin connectors together with the 4pin ATX connector, next to the heatsink for the voltage regulators. Overall, I thought it was a nice clean layout.

Definiately from these pictures you can see how the board layout is rather nice.  Other than the dimm socket colors, I found the board very easy to initially set up and use at stock settings.

Unfortunately I later ran into an annoying layout issue when trying to switch memory modules - I found it impossible to switch dimms in the dimm slot closest to the CPU without unmounting the monstrous Noctua NH-U 12 cooler. I also had a number of issues when overclocking - but that's for later in the article.  I'm not sure if this is something you'd blame on the oversized Noctua (as well you can blame the Thermalright Ultra series of coolers or the board itself, but the layout does put the DIMM slots close enough to the CPU socket that some oversized coolers will obstruct at least one or two DIMM slots, leading to some unfortunate circumstances if you need to swap out your RAM.

In the above picture you can see the Noctua NH-U12 mounted on the K9N and obstructing those fancy OCZ RAM sticks.  You can also see another slight problem which has plagued many a motherboard: the DIMM slots are close enough to an installed video card that removing RAM from an installed system is difficult or potentially impossible without first removing the video card.

The Bundle

The board came with a decent if not spectacular bundle.

As befits current standards, the board comes with rounded IDE cable and floppy cables, and MSI also included four SATA cables and two four pin SATA power cables, a rear I/O panel cover, a dual USB slot cover and a single firewire slot cover (why they did not make a combination dual USB / single firewire slot cover is beyond me!), an SLI bridge and a slot cover with cutouts for cooling.

A RAID driver diskette, CD of drivers and utilities, manual and quick start guide round out the bundle.

I am certain all of us have seen cables and manuals before,  so let's take a look at the BIOS...