MSI K9A Platinum

Rounding Things Up...

I think the key message here is that keeping things simple can really work well. MSI has a regular layout with things that are obvious to find and unobtrusive. Only the necessary things like Firewire and simply four SATA 2 ports are included, although the need for dual Gigabit Ethernet is questionable. Integrating Wi-Fi or eSATA would be arguably better than the second Gigabit Ethernet port, and it would add that bit extra functionality. We say this because MSI appears to like catering for everyone a little bit instead of going all out down one path.

We subjected the MSI K9A Platinum to our usual stress test that is in excess of anything anyone would normally put a board through; the board lasted a solid 19 hours before hard locking. That's not a bad showing, in all honesty, although we would have liked to see it pass a full 24 hours. Keep in mind that we also set the ram to 3-3-3-9-1T at 2.3V which is outside of its recommended operating specifications.

Unlike the DFI ICFX3200-T2R/G, setting these timings didn’t take days of fiddling and head scratching - it was a simple case of applying the timings and correct voltage and away it went. Again, the BIOS is well laid out, with a sensible amount of options to tantalise the regular enthusiasts, without being excessive. With this in mind, overall performance is fantastic, with it beating both the Sapphire PC-AM2RD580 and the MSI K9N Platinum nForce 570 SLI boards that we tested a few months ago in the majority of cases.

You can pick up a K9A Platinum for an absolutely bargainous price of under £80 if you shop around. Which, considering motherboards now are topping £250 in some cases, a full dual x16 CrossFire board for this price makes a potentially great purchase. OK, so socket AM2 AMD Athlon 64 processors aren’t as desirable as the Intel Core 2 Duo’s right now, but you shouldn’t have to have a deep pocket to have a gaming or enthusiast board.

Below the price of the Core 2 Duo E6300, there's really only one processor manufacturer in the game, and that's AMD. It's low-end Athlon 64 X2 4000+ and X2 3800+ processors are in direct competition with Intel's ageing Pentium D processors. The Pentium D's just don't cut the mustard these days, I'm afraid. Until the Core 2 Duo E4300 is widely available, that's not going to change, either.

Overclocking:

During overclocking we found a bit of a show stopping problem though. After dropping the multiplier and Hyper Transport frequency, we continued to overclock successfully until we reached 300MHz CPU bus. At this point the board failed to boot... permanently. After discussing the situation with MSI, a company representative admitted that it had been a known problem that was believed to be fixed in the last BIOS, and the problem had easily been rectified by clearing the CMOS.

Despite our best efforts with swapping of CPUs, memory and removing batteries nothing could resurrect the dead board. Having searched the net for other people experiencing the same problem, we couldn't find anything, and we can only assume we were unfortunate and something failed on our board. A final problem is that the CoreCell is soldered to the board, so replacing it (and the BIOS) is out of the question unless you replace the whole board.

It was an unfortunate end to an overall excellent experience. We had the board stable in Windows at 260MHz HTT clock and in all honesty I got a bit carried away and jumped to straight to 280MHz, and then 300MHz before checking if there was any kind of stability. However rare it is these days, overclocking can potentially permanently damage your components, and it's always a possibility and a risk you take when stressing hardware outside its normal operating parameters.

Final Thoughts...

MSI's K9A Platinum is an excellent performer at stock speeds, but it's overclocking capabilities are a little bugged and somewhat limited. If you're looking for an overclocker's motherboard, you're better looking at more expensive boards from DFI, Abit and Asus. If heavy overclocking isn't your cup of tea, there's no denying that this board is tremendous value for money for anyone looking to build a fast gaming system on a budget.