MSI K9N SLI Platinum

Memory Performance:

MSI has engineered this board well to not only provide an exceptionally fast but incredibly low latency memory setup. We used 3-3-3-9-1T timings at DDR2-800 for all nForce-500 chipsets in the test, and having treble checked our latency scores we can only conclude the result is a real one and MSI have done an exceptional job.

Disk Performance:

The SATA read tests were conducted with a 74GB Western Digital Raptor using HD Tach 3.0.1.0's 8MB zone test. The USB 2.0 tests were done using an ATA133 160GB Maxtor DiamondMax 10 hard drive (model number: 6L160PO) using the same 8MB zone test enclosed in an Icy Box USB 2.0 hard drive caddy. We recorded the average read speeds in all cases.

SATA performance is virtually equivalent to the other boards tested with the same hard drive, 0.2MB/sec slower than the nForce 590 SLI boards, but nothing anyone will ever notice in the real world.

USB 2.0 speeds are fractionally slower, however the K9N SLI Platinum also uses a fraction less CPU when accessing USB devices.