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Written by Fedja Drndarski
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Monday, 14 July 2008 |
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Page 1 of 2  This time MSI made an extra effort to provide fully equipped motherboard for AMD platform that will match performances and OC potential side-by-side with competitive Asus, Gigabyte, Biostar etc. Cooling solution responsible for CPU power supply unit cooling is special Circu-Pipe cooler similar to those that came with ASUS M3N HT-mempipe and Crosshair 2 motherboards. Alongside this MB, MSI delivers K9A2 V2 Platinum, distinguished with absence of back panel eSATA and two SATA ports.
First glance at the motherboard and its clear that we are looking at MSI product. Multicolored (green, orange and blue) slots became trade mark of this brand. First detail that attracted our attention where the endings of memory slots that are much closer to PCI-Express 16x slot, but still far enough to clear away any doubt of getting in the way of longer graphics cards. A couple of microswitches that perform starting and restarting functions also look interesting. K9A2 Platinum features high quality electronics as well as all high class 790FX motherboards. All capacitors are “solid”, which guarantees stable work, high temperature resistance and long working life.
BIOS is definitely a weak spot of most new motherboards designed for Phenom K10 CPUs. K9A2, as well as some other motherboards, couldn’t boot up with DDR2 memory settings at 1066 MHz, although it is designed to work with it. Overclocking possibilities are promising, but unfortunately, current version of BIOS, which was implemented on our test sample, simply wasn’t polished enough to accomplish maximum performances with our Phenom 8750 X3 CPU.
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There is more than enough space for enthusiasts to manipulate with voltage settings. After any kind of manipulation with multiplier for integrated northbridge, motherboard was unable to boot up. Even though, we managed to get 240MHz HTT bus and respectable 2870MHz, which resulted in HTT link and northbridge speed of almost 2.2GHz. At the same time, this was the maximum frequency for northbridge in combination with our AMD X3 CPU, but we are sure that new versions of BIOS and reduced NB multiplier can result in achieving much better overclocking results. With standard frequencies, MSI K9A2 Platinum showed excellent performance, although memory was set at conventional 800MHz. To reduce OC handicap caused by BIOS, we tightened up memory timings to CL 4 4-4-12 1T command rate, which resulted in minimal or no performance loss at all. We were pleasantly surprised by performances in some situations. We assume that Phenom CPU on this motherboard works by default in “turbo” mode, with a bit higher power consumption but better performance as well.
General impression
At first glance this motherboard isn’t breathtaking, especially if you are experienced overclocker. Incomplete BIOS and its incompatibility with DDR2-1066 memory spoiled our impressions. During tests of this motherboard, revision of BIOS used was from March 2008 with updated CPU module which has string for Phenom X3 8750 processor. Although this motherboard has potential, under these circumstances it is very hard to get better results.
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MotherBoards 
