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MSI sent us an K9A2 Platinum recently; and we put it through the wringer.

The K9A2 Platinum is certainly not short of features. It is based on the relatively new AMD 790FX Northbridge, and a SB600 Southbridge. The combination supports HT 3.0, dual channel DDR2 at up to 1066MHz supporting up to 8GB of memory, dual PCIe 2.0 16x slots, dual PCIe 8x slots, one PCIe 1x slot and two old fashioned PCI slots.

We have not reviewed many AM2 motherboards in the last few months, so I cheated, and included results from other AM2 CPU reviews we have done recently for our benchmark testing. This gives more points of comparison as our CPU and motherboard reviews use mostly the same benchmarks. I should also note that our Phenom 9600 launch article was done with a K9A2 CF, which is very similar to the K9A2 Platinum.

The K9A2 Platinum also has one IDE channel, four SATA2 ports on the SB600, and four more SATA2 ports (two internal, two external) provided by a Promise controller. Eight channel audio, Gigabit Ethernet and FireWire round out the major features - but in case you want to know more, below you can see the specifications from the MSI site:

Specifications

CPU

• AMD® Phenom/Athlon/Sempron in the Socket AM2+ package.

FSB

• HyperTransport 3.0 supporting speed up to 2600MHz

Chipset

• AMD® 790FX and SB600 Chipset

Main Memory

• Supports Dual DDR II 533/667/800/1066
• 4 DDRII DIMMs (240pin / 1.8V)
• Supports a maximum memory size up to 8GB.

Slots

• 2 mazarine PCI Express x16 slots (PCI Express Bus SPEC V2.0 compliant; supports CrossFire Technology)
• 2 light-blue PCI Express x16 slots with x8 operations (PCI Express Bus SPEC V2.0 compliant; supports CrossFire Technology)
• When 4 PCI Express x16 slots are all installed, the PCIE x 16 lanes will auto arrange form x16/ x0/ x16/ x0  to x8/ x8/ x8/ x8
• 1 PCI Express x1 slots
• 2 PCI slots, support 3.3V/ 5V PCI bus Interface.

On-Board IDE

• One IDE port by AMD® SB600
• Supports Ultra DMA 66/100/133 mode
• Supports PIO, Bus Master operation mode
• Can connect up to two IDE devices

On-Board SATA

• 4 SATA II (1~4) ports by AMD® SB600
• 2 SATA II (5~6) ports by Promise® T3, support SAS ready devices, for storage devices only
• 2 eSATA ports by Promise® T3, for storage devices only
• Supports storage and data transfers at up to 300 MB/s

RAID Function

• SATA II 1~4 support RAID 0, 1 and 0+1 mode by AMD® SB600
• SATA II 5~6 & 2 eSATA ports support RAID 0, 1 and 0+1 mode by Promise® T3
• RAID setup floppy disk is optional depending on the districts. You can download the files from the website to make the setup disk.

Audio

• Chipset integrated by Realtek® ALC888/ALC888T
• Flexible 8-channel audio with jack sensing
• Compliant with Azalia 1.0 Spec

LAN  

• Realtek PCI-E GbLAN controller 8111B
• Integrated Fast Ethernet MAC and PHY in single chip
• Supports 10Mb/s, 100Mb/s and 1000Mb/s
• Compliance with PCI-Express Bus specification v1.0a

IEEE1394

• Chipset integrated by VIA® VT6308P
• Transfer rate is up to 400Mbps

Internal I/O Connectors

• ATX 24-pin power connector
• ATX 4-pin 12V CPU power connector
• ATX 4-pin VGA power connector
• CPU / System x 4 FAN connectors
• CD-in connector
• Front panel audio connector
• Front panel connector
• 3 x USB 2.0 connector support additional 6 ports
• 1 x Floppy disk drive connector
• 6 x Serial ATA II connectors
• 1 x ATA133 HD connectors
• 1 x SPDIF-out header
• 1 x IEEE1394 connector support additional 1 ports  (optional)
• 1 x Serial port header (optional)
• 1 x VoIP card header (optional)
• 1 x  floppy disk cable (optional)

Back Panel I/O Ports

• 1 x PS/2 keyboard
• 1 x PS/2 mouse
• 1 x Optical SPDIF out
• 1 x IEEE1394 Port (optional)
• 1 x 6 in 1 audio jack
• 4 x USB 2.0 ports
• 1 x RJ45 LAN jack
• 2 x eSATA ports

Dimension

• 30.5cm(L) x 24.5cm(W) ATX Form Factor

Mounting

• 9 mounting holes. 

Includes

• IDE cable
• 2 x SATA power cable
• 4 x SATA cable
• 1 x IEEE1394 bracket
• 1 x eSATA to SATA cable