If you want AMD performance without the cost, MSI’s K9A2 Platinum might be the ticket. It’s a bare-bones yet performance-oriented board for Phenom procs.
Based on the AMD 790FX chipset, the MSI K9A2 Platinum sports four x16 physical PCI-E 2.0 slots. While most boards today sport six expansion slots, MSI goes the max with seven slots. Four are full-length PCI-E slots, two are PCI and the seventh is a dinky x1 PCI-E. You pay a price for it though. The extra slot forces the top slot so close to the RAM that you’ll have to remove the GPU if you want to pull the RAM out.
Also irksome are the six SATA ports, which point straight up. If you run a large PCI-E card in the slot above it, you’ll block access to some or all of the SATA ports. The K9A2 Platinum also gives you a slight edge over its direct competitor, the Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe Wi-Fi in SATA. You get two eSATA ports and MSI uses a Promise controller that supports both SATA and SAS drives. If you’re a true drive aficionado, thisdoes give you a cheap and easy way to access the higher-speed SAS drives that you just can’t get in SATA today.
Like the Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe, the K9A2 Platinum uses a fairly moderate heat pipe design for the north and south bridges and the voltage regulators. That’s perhaps one of the better messages with the 790FX chipset–thermals. While Nvidia can’t make a cool-running chipset to save its life, ATI’s chipsets have always been spectacularly miserly in thermal generation.
What you get in heat savings, though, you give up in south-bridge functionality. The SB600 maxes out at four SATA drives while Nvidia chipsets give you six ports. Ethernet port teaming and other advanced features such as packet prioritizing are also MIA when compared to comparable Nvidia chipsets.
On the performance front, we found the board to be the equivalent of Asus’s pricier M3A32-Deluxe Wi-Fi board. That’s no surprise though. Unless a vendor has screwed up the BIOS, Phenom and Athlon 64 chipsets rarely show much of a performance difference due to the on-die memory controller. So with our 2.5GHz Phenom X4, GeForce 8800GTX, 2GB of DDR2/1066, and Windows XP Professional installed, it was pretty much a tie. That’s something we’re likely to see as Intel adopts an on-die memory controller as well this year.
One thing we continue to love about MSI boards is the company’s updating utility that will search out and install driver and BIOS updates for you. It’s damned better than Asus’s horribly slow website and update utility, which successfully connects with a server only one out of five times.
Not all is good with MSI utilities though. If you ever have to update the BIOS via DOS and floppy disk, may the gods help you. You don’t just boot from a floppy disk, update the BIOS, and call it a day. You have to boot onto a floppy disc that can create a RAM disk. You then copy the BIOS file and updater to the RAM disk and flash from there. If you try to flash directly from floppy disk, kiss the BIOS goodbye. Fortunately, the windows-based updater works 90 percent of the time so it shouldn’t be an issue for most folks. Still, it’s annoying at best. If Asus and every other vendor can perform disk-based BIOS updates without the need to use a RAM disk, why can’t MSI?
So where does the MSI fall? The SATA ports could be placed better, but even that’s not a fatal flaw, as there are plenty of x16 physical PCI-E slots. What we do like is the SAS support, one extra PCI-E slot, better web support, and a pretty damned good street price of $150.
SAS support and super-low pricing.
Poor SATA port placement; fallback DOS update method is horrible.
| Asus M3A32-MVP | MSI K9A2 Platinum | |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | Phenom X4 9850 | Phenom X4 9850 |
| Clock | 2.5GHz | 2.5GHz |
| L2 Cache | 2MB | 2MB |
| FSB/x | N/A | N/A |
| RAM Clock | 1066 | 1066 |
| RAM Settings | 5-5-5-15-2T | 5-5-5-15-2T |
| GPU | GeForce 8800 GTX | GeForce 8800 GTX |
| GPU Clock | 576/900/1350 | 576/900/1350 |
| GPU Drivers | 169.21 | 169.21 |
| PCMark Overall | 8,206 | 8,302 |
| PCMark CPU | 7,409 | 7,367 |
| PCMark RAM | 4,766 | 4,704 |
| PCMark GPU | 12,610 | 12,308 |
| PCMark HDD | 7,317 | 7,145 |
| Cinebench 10 | 8,079 | 8,034 |
| ProShow | 20:13 | 20:06 |
| MainConcept | 31:27 | 31:42 |
| 3DMark06 Overall | 12,020 | 11,862 |
| 3DMark06 CPU | 3,807 | 3,776 |
| HD Tach Avg. | 77.4 | 77.4 |
| ScienceMark 2.0 Overall | 1,611.54 | 1,615.26 |
| ScienceMark 2.0 MEM | 7,882.5 | 7,969.66 |
| Valve Particle test | 71 | 71 |
| UT3 standard | 83 | 82 |
| FEAR Max/min | 213 | 217 |
| Quake 4 low | 152.7 | 144.3 |
| 3DDB | 2,236 | 2,241 |
| UE Mem Read | 8,149 | 7,664 |
| UE Mem Write | 5,037 | 5,024 |
| UE Mem Copy | 8,586 | 8,558 |
| UE Mem Latency | 54.7 | 56.3 |
Jims45wow
March 31, 2010 at 10:13am
Ola. I happily use a k9a2 Platinum. Thanks.
Prob. 1: Been virtually impossible to find for some time.
Prob. 2: New chipsets are out.
Prob. 3. No indepth analysis of what's really good with new chipsets, and which combo of features pays off.
Prob. 4. No update of 'Best of the Best' for this and a several other categories.
Prob. 5. When you finally do update, prices will increase and items will be harder to get! Ha.
Thanks.
Jim
jhtalisman
March 16, 2009 at 1:16pm
Maybe you could do a bit more knowledgable search in regards to flashing the bios on this board, it's no sweat either via floppy or USB drive. The instructions for flashing via floppy are on their website, or did you not bother reading them?
One of the MSI forum moderators even created a noob level tool for flashing using a USB drive. If the editors and reviewers can't find and/or figure it out then you shouldn't wonder why I don't bother buying your magazine.
And I own and love this board, had minimal problems with it, only with a few mediocre BIOS updates that made things worse instead of better. The 1.6 and the beta 1.74 work flawlessly however.
cfmwarren
February 04, 2009 at 6:20pm
I have a Asus M2N-SLI mobo which is crap for overclocking and is a barebones board. Can anyone recommend a good SLI ready AM2 board? between 100-200$ if possible.
Thanks
Caboose
June 26, 2008 at 11:59pm
Looks like I made the right choice in my purchase. It was a tossup for me between the Asus and the MSI, and from your benchmarks, it looks like I picked right! One of the nice features, is the extra heatpipes and fins for RAM cooling. It's an optinal add-in, and so far I can't really tell a temperature difference, but it is nice to have and should help in the long run
The only thing with the RAM heatpipes are that they need to be installed BEFORE you install the CPU, it only helps cool 2 out of 4 sticks of RAM, and I've found that so far, the sides that are supposed to attach to the RAM don't fit snugly and more pressure is applied to the top. It'd be nicer if the screws to tighten the paddles (that's what I'm gonna call'em from now on) were in the middle to apply more even pressure to the RAM. Another thing that'd be nice, is if it was somehow possible to cool all 4 sticks, but with the limited space between sticks of RAM, that doesn't look to be possible.
Once the RAM heatpipes are installed, you can easily install the CPU and Heatsink/FAN, but with the size of the heat-fins (what else could they be called) surrounding the CPU, it makes aftermarket CPU coolers difficult to use (I've wanted to use the Zalman CNPS9700 NT Ultra Quiet CPU Cooler, or the Zalman CNPS9500 AM2 Ultra Quiet CPU Cooler) as a lot of them are much larger than a stock heatsink/fan so they'll hit the heat-fins. But that's something that I can forgive Asus for.
There are plenty of Fan power headers on the motherboard for a system that has a lot of fans, however the CPU heatsink fan power header is somewhat poorly placed. Having it sit right next to the RAM slots makes it difficult to get access to once the RAM cooling accessory is installed, but not impossible.
Lack of PCI-E 1x isn't a big deal as not many expansion cards support PCI-E 1x. Thankfully I have a Sound Blaster X-FI Xtreme Gamer soundcard, and it's a PCI interface (Thanks Maximum PC. It's a freaking amazing soundcard).
One thing that some may notice, is the 8-pin 12v header located in the top left corner of the board. When you take the board out of the box, 4-pins are covered, indicating that the motherboard CAN run with a 4-pin 12v power cable, or 8-pin. And the inclusion of WiFi (802.11g) is a nice touch, means that you now have the option of wireless networking while keeping all your expansion slots open.
A single eSATA connection, along with 6 USB 2.0 ports, a single Gigabit ethernet port, 1 Keyboard PS/2 connection, no serial or parallel ports, as well as 7.1 onboard audio with a fiber optic and a coax SPDI/F connection and a singlefirewire port are al available on the back pannel leave users with plenty of connections. The 6 USB 2.0 connections, are nice.
All in all, I'm really pleased with this motherboard. I can't wait till I can get a nice 1200w PSU (yes, I am insane) and get 2 or 3 ATI Radeon 4870 PCI-E video cards! Then I'll have a smokin' rig! Oh, and I'll need some DDR2-1066 RAM. How much of a performance difference does DDR2-1066 make compared to DDR2-800? Is it going to be THAT noticable? I run Windows Vista Ultimate 32bit and am a gamer, so I'm wondering if I should upgrade to 1066 RAM. Sorry this post turned into a mini-review of the Asus M3A-32 MVP Delux Wifi motherboard, I'm just THAT happy with it.
-= I don't want to be dead, I want to be alive! Or... a cowboy! =-
Print
