Author: William Henning
Editor: Howard Ha
Publish Date: Tuesday, January 29th, 2008
Originally Published on Neoseeker (http://www.neoseeker.com)
Article Link: http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Reviews/msi_k9a2_platinum/
Copyright Neo Era Media, Inc. - please do not redistribute or use for commercial purposes.
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
FSB
Chipset
Main Memory
Slots
On-Board IDE
On-Board SATA
RAID Function
Audio
LAN
IEEE1394
Internal I/O Connectors
Back Panel I/O Ports
Dimension
Mounting
Includes
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:
(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.
The BIOS
MSI went with a pretty plain Jane AMI BIOS. There are eight sub-menu's available from the top level menu:
And a further five options:
The Standard CMOS Features menu is very standard; nothing exciting here.
The Advanced BIOS Features are also as expected.
The Chipset Features lets you control PCIe 1.0 vs. 2.0 for the GPU slots.
The Integrated Peripherals menu allows you to enable/disable the the on-board peripherals.
The On-Chip ATA devices lets you configure the IDE mode, disable the on-board SATA controller, and set the RAID mode.
The Power Management Setup lets you control ACPI & wakeup events.
More BIOS
The Wake Up Event Setup under power management gives you quite a bit of choice in what events will bring your computer out of sleep mode.
The PNP/PCI Configuration menu gives you a bit of control over IRQ settings.
The Hardware Monitor screen lets you take a good look at temperatures and voltages on the motherboard; I wish it showed the DDR2 voltage as well.
Now we get to the fun stuff!
The Cell Menu is where you can tweak your processor and memory.
Do yourself a favor and ignore the "D.O.T." stuff - while I am sure MSI spent a lot of effort on their dynamic overcloking, it will not get you as good results as carefully hand tuning your system.
The Cell menu gives you good control over voltages, FSB speed, multiplier and memory settings - I rather like it.
The User Settings menu lets you save two different CMOS configurations - I tend to use it for "tuned safe OC" and "extreme OC" settings. ;-) !
In order to keep the testing as fair as possible, we will use the following test platforms:
Socket AM2:
Software used during testing consisted of the following:
Please note that we are showing overclocked results in all the charts - we are not holding you in suspense until the end of the article. The chart labels incorporate a lot of information about the test configuration. The first line shows the socket type and the model of the processor. Since all the processors shown are dual-core devices, we did not specify that on the charts.
The second line shows the "FSB/HT clock rate" x "CPU multiplier" followed by the effective memory speed. All DDR2 tests were run at 4-4-4-12 timings unless otherwise specified.
Business Winstone
The MSI K9A2 Platinum does extremely well at Business Winstone!
Content Creation
The K9A2 also does well for Content Creation at stock speeds.
WinRAR
Please excuse the dual charts; we are transitioning to only running the multi-threaded test, and I scrounged test results from both motherboard and processor reviews in order to show more data. The MSI K9A2 Platinum does well at WinRAR MT.
HDTach
It's nice to see SATA2 results that reflect SATA2 speeds for the burst reads. Note how the MSI K9A2 Platinum gets 10MB/sec more than the M2N32-SLI even for average speed!
The burst IDE performance of the MSI K9A2 Platinum is not as great as the comparison boards, however it does have a slight edge in average rates.
The K9A2 did not do well for USB drives - about 10% less performance with greater CPU usage. Perhaps newer drivers will help.
LAME MP3
As we are transitioning to showing only multi-threaded results for LAME, once again I present you with two chards.
The MSI K9A2 Platinum did OK but not great.
TMPGEnc
The MSI K9A2 Platinum did much better at TMPGEnc, tying the previous top result at stock speeds.
XVid
The MSI K9A2 Platinum also did very well for XviD
Call of Duty
Decent performance for the MSI K9A2 Platinum at stock speeds.
Commanche 4
The MSI K9A2 Platinum did poorly for Comanche.
Doom 3
The MSI K9A2 Platinum did very well for stock, and even better when overclocked for Doom 3!
Quake 4
Again, very good results at stock and even better overclocked for the MSI K9A2 Platinum.
Halo
The MSI K9A2 Platinum was sub-par at stock for Halo.
Jedi Knight
The MSI K9A2 Platinum redeemed itself with Jedi Knight, turning in excellent results at stock.
UT4K
The MSI K9A2 Platinum also likes UT - again, excellent results at stock.
Sandra CPU
The Sandra CPU tests really are not affected by the motherboard they are run on, and the MSI K9A2 Platinum did well.
Sandra Memory Bandwidth
Very good memory results for the MSI K9A2 Platinum!
And very good latency numbers as well.
RightMark Read
Both stock and overclocked RightMark Read results were excellent for the MSI K9A2 Platinum.
RightMark Write
The MSI K9A2 Platinum had outstanding RightMark Write performance at stock speeds, and quite good when overclocked.
RightMark Latency
The MSI K9A2 Platinum had outstanding latency results at stock and overclocked speeds.
RightMark Bandwidth
The Bandwidth numbers were very good at stock and even better when overclocked for the MSI K9A2 Platinum.
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:
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.
Please do not redistribute or use this article in whole, or in part, for commercial purposes.