Overclocking

We dropped in an Athlon X2 BE-2350 as it's actually one of the few Athlon X2s with a massive amount of overclocking headroom. At £55 (inc. VAT) this is certainly a good buy, or if you've got a bit more to spend the 65nm Energy Efficient 5000+ is just £70 (inc. VAT) and is 500MHz faster at its stock speed.

With the BE-2350 we achieved a much higher overclock than we had previously managed on our Asus M2N32-SLI Deluxe. We successfully overclocked to a stable 290MHz CPU bus on the K9A2 CF, with the HyperTransport link speed running at 1.45GHz and the OCZ PC9200 DDR2 memory at 1GHz with 2.1V. That's a 3.05GHz CPU clock, or nearly a 1GHz overclock to put things into perspective!

We wanted more and tried for a nice round 300MHz CPU bus but found that it created continual errors whilst booting Windows, and services started shutting down in a rather spontaneous fashion.

It’s worth mentioning that we experienced some voltage fluctuation from 1.376-1.384V after we overvolted the processor slightly, but even at the above speeds it remained fully stable.

While it's not a 2GHz HT3.0 that a Phenom is capable of, the Phenoms we've used haven't even made it to 210MHz CPU bus stable and have very little overhead in comparison. There's also no L3 cache TLB BIOS fix included with the current MSI BIOS either.

Stability

We used a dual-core Athlon 64 X2 6000+ first of all and ran Prime95 with 3DMark06 looping for several hours. Having easily survived that without a problem, we dropped in a Phenom 9900 (2.6GHz) to see what happens. The board booted fine with a Phenom, although it does require a clear CMOS. However, what the MSI K9A2 CF didn't like was the memory set at 1,066MHz, even though we were running memory that is rated far in excess of this specification.

Having left the memory at 800MHz we ran Prime95 and 3DMark06 again for several hours to stress it further and see if the four phases were up to the task of keeping four cores stable. After several more hours we came back to find the system was again still churning away and fully responsive. Overall, a great result for MSI.

Power Consumption

The power consumption use is far lower than the other two performance boards, because of the combination of fewer components and cooler chipset used. This means it saves 15-20W over the Gigabyte in idle and load, and a whole lot more than the Asus which uses Nvidia chipsets.

Value and Conclusions

The 790X seems like a bit of an awkward intermediary – most value boards feature the 770X chipset and are around £50-60, whereas the 790FX Premium chipset is used everywhere for anything above £130. Gigabyte is the only other major manufacturer to use the 790X chipset on its GA-MA790X-DS4, and while it retails for around £80, some £20 more than the MSI K9A2 CF, it also has more features.

While only two boards are available, this situation better relates to greater consumer choice – if you want the extra PCI-Express x1 ports, better power regulation and a more complete rear I/O, then the Gigabyte is a better choice. However, if you're after a motherboard that covers the basics but still gives you the ability to run CrossFire, then the MSI is ideal. It wholly depends on what you need and how much you're prepared to pay.

Final Thoughts

The MSI K9A2 CF provides excellent value as the cheapest multi-GPU, PCI-Express 2.0 board you'll find on the market today. The fact it’s not based on the premium chipset in its range means it isn't faster than a 790FX motherboard, but it still keeps up with the crowd and overclocks like a monster if you have the CPU to match.

For £60, it's an exceptionally capable and very stable motherboard that also has a solid BIOS at this early stage in the 790X’s life. Considering the fact that Phenoms are dropping in price hand over fist and the Radeon HD 3850s and Radeon HD 3870s are good buys already, this board is a perfect addition to an inexpensive upgrade to quad-core and DirectX 10.

• Performance
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• 8/10

• Features
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• 7/10

• Value
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• 10/10

• Overall
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• 8/10

What do these scores mean?

Addendum 28/01/2008: In light of recent events where the MSI K9A2 CF is not warranted to use AMD CPUs of 125W TDP - including the AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+, 6400+ and future Phenom 9700 and 9900 CPUs, we have decided to remove the previous award for this product. Unless you want to use other CPUs and not overclock, we can no longer recommend this motherboard for everyone.