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Overclocking

I was quite pleased with how well the MSI K9A2 Platinum overclocked - it managed to reach 270MHz HT speed stably; granted this is lower than the 300MHz the M2N32-SLI can reach, but it is very good for a Socket AM2 motherboard nonetheless.

As you saw from the charts, the 12x250 (3.0GHz) results were often better than the 11x270 (2.97GHz) results. Unlike Intel's FSB based architecture, the independent HyperTransport and memory channels mean that there is not an "all critical" FSB that must be tuned as high as possible. For AMD architectures, as long as the memory is running fast enough to feed the cores, the absolute core speed will be more important than the highest possible hypertransport speed.

In order to run at 3.0GHz we just:

• increased the HT speed to 250MHz
• set the HT multiplier to 4
• set the processor multiplier to 12
• set Vcore to 1.4V
• set Vmem to 2.1V required by the Corsair modules
• set the DDR2 timing to 720-4-4-4-12

Please note that our other stable overclock setting, 11x270, had a 990-4-4-4-12 memory timing and required Vcore of 1.44 - however in most benchmarks, the extra 30MHz of CPU speed gave the 12x250 720-4-4-4-12 setting a slight advantage.

Conclusion

The MSI K9A2 Platinum had excellent business performance, and decent gaming performance - so it is quite a good board overall - however it does not take the overclocking champion crown away from the excellent Asus M2N32-SLI.

Overall, the board layout was good - with plenty of spacing between the GPU PCIe slots, allowing for some pretty hefty GPU coolers. I liked having a reset button and a power button on the board - it makes testing much easier; however I really did not like the position of that chip near the heatsink mounting screw hole - it prevented me from using our standard Noctua-12 for testing; and I suspect I'd have been able to overclock a bit higher with it.

The SATA and memory performance was excellent - no doubt that's why business apps flew, the gaming performance was good too - you basically cannot go wrong with this board. Unfortunately we did not have time to test those tempting PCIe 2.0 x16 slots, however we have no reason to believe that Crossfire would not perform well on this board - after all, our ageing Nvidia 7800GT did quite well.

Other than the mounting hole, I think MSI did an excellent job on the board.