MSI K9A2 Platinum

The MSI K9A2 Platinum is a very good solid motherboard that offers a lot of features. It's specifically designed to work and run on AMD Phenom processors and has support for 4-way Crossfire X capability. It enjoys good multiplier overclocking with excellent stability.

Even though the AMD 790FX chipset offers a great reserve for the future (in other words, its functionality is hardly necessary for a generic modern computer, even if it's assembled for games), MSI tried to design a practical motherboard. It may come in handy to users, who want to rig it up to maximum right now (including four graphics cards with two-slot cooling systems). Those who just want to upgrade their computers or assemble a new one may also like this motherboard, if they want a platform that can be expanded in future, and which has no expensive bells and whistles (they are often installed in motherboards on top chipsets to justify high prices).

The MSI K9A2 Platinum is a motherboard that was built specifically for running AMD’s Phenom processor and CrossFireX. If that is what you use it for it works well with a Black Edition processor. It can run stable and enjoys some healthy Phenom multiplier overclocking but you need to be aware that you need to put some airflow on the board’s passive cooling devices.

The K9A2 Platinum is well equipped, offering four PCI-E X16 slots, a host of integrated components, dual eSATA ports with RAID capability, and more. Aside from having to hard reset the BIOS after a failed overclock and the chipset heat-pipe potentially touching a graphics card, we were quite pleased with the K9A2 Platinum and feel comfortable recommending this motherboard to anyone planning to make the move to AMD's Spider platform.

MSI has done a wonderful job with their K9A2 Platinum motherboard. The performance is higher than the last AMD motherboard we did the Gigabyte GA-M69GM-S2H motherboard back in September. The ability to do Quadfire (Four ATI cards in Crossfire) is excellent. The minor issue with the motherboard utility aside and the problem with setting up RAID aside, this was a joy to work with.