Related Articles

The Board

The MSI K9A2 Platinum came with not one, but two quick installation guides, a manual, and two CD's of drivers and utilities.

You also get:

• four SATA2 cables
• an IDE cable
• a floppy cable
• two Crossfire bridges
• "easy connect" front panel connectors
• a backpanel I/O shield
• a firewire bracket
• a dual USB bracket
• a partridge
• and a pear tree

(I was kidding about the partridge and a pear tree.)

The motherboard has a nice clean layout, with four PCIe 16x physical connectors, two PCI slots, and one PCIe 1x slot. There are heatpipes connecting the Northbridge, Southbridge and voltage regulator heatsinks, and the Northbridge cooler has a unique round design.

One thing I did not like is that the memory channels are NOT color keyed; so if you put your two memory sticks in say the two green slots, you will be running in single channel mode.

I thought I'd show you the back of the board - note the surface mount components under the processor socket; they could cause problems with third party coolers if they have an "X" mount.

Here are some close up shots of the Northbridge and voltage regulator coolers - they have a pretty unique design:

Look at all those slots... and also note the six SATA2 connectors.

The back I/O panel features PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports, a firewire port, optical sound output, two eSATA connectors, four USB2.0 connectors, a gigabit Ethernet port, and the usual analog sound jacks.

But now, we come to a problem with the layout of the board - at least for people who like to use some high end third party coolers such as the Noctua-12.

Note how close that 74LVC07AD chip is to the mounting hole for the heatsink retention mechanism. It does clear the stock AMD solution... but...

Look what happens when I try to install a Noctua mounting bracket!

The bracket ends up sitting on top of one of the legs of the integrated circuit; the heatsink would not be able to mount properly, that pin of the integrated circuit would be shorted to the mounting bracket - which would likely break the pin off and damage the board.