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MSI K9A Platinum

MSI brings to market a new ATI Radeon Xpress 3200 motherboard with Crossfire support. This board contains ATI’s new SB600 south bridge. We find out what the inclusion of this south bridge, with the already proven Radeon Xpress 3200 can do.

Introduction

MSI Micro Star International Co. Ltd. was founded in 1986 and since that time, they have branched out into several markets ranging from VGA cards to notebooks. Motherboards are the bread and butter of the company, and MSI has always made solid and stable motherboards. MSI has always made excellent motherboards for the enthusiast market as well. Originally they started capturing the hearts of overclockers and enthusiasts with their AMD Athlon motherboards. Today MSI has brought us the K9A Platinum motherboard based on ATI’s Radeon Express 3200 Crossfire chipset. The unique thing about this board compared to earlier Xpress 3200 offerings is the use of ATI’s newly released SB600 south bridge. You may or may not recall that up until now ATI chipset based motherboards usually didn’t have an ATI designed south bridge due to the fact that the early ATI south bridges seriously lacked features like SATA II support and the USB performance was nothing short of dismal. ATI claims to have rectified that situation. We will cover the new south bridge in more detail later on in the review.

The K9A Platinum is MSI’s latest offering supporting AMD’s socket AM2 series CPUs. The K9A Platinum supports AMD’s Athlon 64, X2, FX, and Sempron series processors. The board supports two full speed PCI-Express x16 slots and is fully compatible with ATI’s Crossfire dual video card technology. Memory speeds up to DDR 800 are officially supported using DDR 2 memory modules. Following industry trends the K9A Platinum requires only a few components to operate as a full system. Components needed include a socket AM2 processor, ATX 2.0 power supply, hard drive, DDR 2 memory and a PCI-Express x16 video card. MSI integrated the following components into the K9A Platinum’s design: 1 EIDE ATA-133 port; 1 floppy port; 4 SATA 3G ports on the SB600 south bridge; 10x USB 2.0 capable ports (4 in rear panel, and 3 onboard headers supporting 2 ports each.); 2 Gigabit Ethernet ports on the rear panel; ALC883 HDA compliant CODEC (2 or 6-Channel Audio) with SPDIF out ports on the back I/O panel and of course, standard PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports.

Main Specifications Overview:

Detailed Specifications Overview:

Packaging

While we usually cover full retail samples of motherboards, this time it is a bit different. We were provided this motherboard through ATI but it was lacking the usual retail packaging.

MSI has included the following items in the package; 4 SATA cables; 2 Molex to SATA power converters; I/O shield; 1 floppy cable; 1 ATA-133 cable and an external USB 2.0/Firewire bracket.

Board Layout

The layout of the K9A Platinum is nearly flawless. The only complaint I have to make is concerning the ATA-133 EIDE port. The port is right behind the motherboard power connector. That isn’t a huge problem, and really wasn’t a point of concern, but it was something I didn’t like. In every other area the board is about as close to a perfect layout as you can get. MSI really did a good job with the layout and should be commended for it. Capacitors on this board were manufactured by KZG and KZJ. The PCB version tested for this article is 1.0.

Just as I mentioned earlier, there are no real flaws to speak of. I am not sure of how one could design a better CPU area. Of course even more space would be nice, but there is more than adequate space for extremely large heat sinks and water blocks. Cooling is really a pretty easy task with this board.

The board’s 4 DDR 2 DIMM sockets are located in front of the CPU socket which is standard practice for AMD Athlon 64 motherboards. The DIMM slots are color coded as usual and the coloring denotes proper installation methods for dual channel operation.

The Northbridge is located just to the left of the CPU socket. The north bridge is passively cooled using a very basic heat sink. This is nice to see as this will cause no problems for inverse mounting of the board in BTX style casings, and there is no irritating high RPM fan to make noise and eventually fail. ATI seems to be the only chipset maker these days that can accomplish the design of such a cool running chipset. Of course there are standard mounting holes here to allow the installation of more extreme chipset cooling devices.

The south bridge is located in between and in front of the dual PCI-Express x16 slots. Like the north bridge the south bridge is cooled by only the most modest heat sink assembly. During the course of the review, neither the north nor south bridge ever reached any kind of excessive temperatures. They were always barely warm to the touch. Again kudos to ATI’s engineering team on that.

The K9A Platinum, as mentioned before, has two PCI-Express x16 slots. Both slots operate at full x16 speeds and therefore have more than enough bandwidth to satisfy the most powerful graphics cards of today. There are two additional PCI-Express x1 slots and two legacy PCI v2.2 slots.

The K9A Platinum includes the following ports on the backplane; 1 PS/2 mouse port; 1 PS/2 keyboard port; 2 RJ-45 ports; 5 mini-headphone jacks for audio; optical and SPDIF out connectors; one RS232 port; and one IEEE1394 port.