“The AMD 790FX chipset is definitely popular with motherboard manufacturers who are all churning out their own boards using the chipset. Today we look at MSI’s 790FX the K9A2 Platinum and take it for a little test run.”Here are some more Motherboard articles from around the web:
- Two Phenom-Friendly Motherboards @ ExtremeTech
- MSI K9A2 Platinum @ Digit-Life
- AMD 770/790 Chipsets: Hyper-Transport 3.0 and PCI Express 2.0 @ Digit-Life
- Asus Maximus Extreme Intel X38 Express Motherboard Review @ PCSTATS
- ASUS Maximus Extreme @ X-bit Labs
- Gigabyte X48-DQ6 @ Legion Hardware
- Gigabyte GA-X48-DQ6 @ Hardware Zone
- ASRock 4Core1600P35-WiFi+AP @ CPU3D
- ASUS P5K Deluxe/WiFi-AP@n @ Gamepyre
- ASUS P5N-T Deluxe @ InsideHW
- ASUS Maximus Formula Intel X38 Motherboard Review @ ThinkComputers
- EVGA 780i SLI @ motherboards.org
A tight squeeze
The MSI K9A2 Platinum seems to have displayed a split personality when it underwent testing at [H]ard|OCP. It is designed to support Crossfire-X, but the slots are so close together you wouldn’t manage to fit 4 double height cards. The chipset heatsinks are small, but they are positioned so close to the CPU that it is very hard to fit a large cooler into the space you have. On the good side the 790FX chipset and the Phenoms do not produce as much heat as we are used to seeing in a C2D and 780i system, so the size is not a crippling factor. [H]ard|OCP also found that while this board has one of the best implementations of
AMD Overdrive, the first board they tested permanently died when they tried pushing the FSB to 210MHz, without tweaking the voltages at all.