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MSI K9A2 Platinum review - overclock friendly mobo for AMD |
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Written by Александър Василев a.k.a. Alex
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Wednesday, 30 April 2008 |
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MSI K9A2 Platinum from up close
The box is quite standard in both shape and size :)
The contents of the box are as usual for MSI rather abundant. In it we can find 1 motherboard :) , two manuals, four SATA and two SATA–Power cables, one IDE and one Floppy cable, motherboard connectors, two discs, back panel for the case, two CrossFire bridges and one extending plate with two USB and single FireWire port.
Reiteration time! Let's go over the specifications again:
Thre are PCI-e 16х slots on the motherboard, and between them are placed two PCI and a single PCI-e 1х. Underneath them is the Floppy connector. This setup provides more better cooling for the videocards and allows the user to have other cards installed, unlike some motherboards on which the PCI slots are blocked by the videocards. There is a single IDE connector and six SATA, two of which are provided by the Promise T3 controller, and are fully capable of supporting the SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) standard. This is a useful thing since it allows to use both SATA and SAS drives with them, unlike the standard SATA connectors.
The voltage regulator and both bridges are cooled by three radiators, interconnected via heatpipe. The Fintek F71882FG provides control over the RPM's of three out of the four fans, the processor temperature, the motherboard temperature and vCore, +3.3v, +5v, +12v и +5v standby voltages. Right beside it you can see (or rather can't see...) one more nice touch – added Power and Reset buttons. The 8-channel sound is provided by Realtek ALC888, the Gigabit network - from RTL8111B.
The possible problem areas – a chip too close to the cooler mounting holes, as well as some elements on the back right between the mounting holes. The round Circu-Pipe radiator could prevent the use of a card with custom cooler on the first slot.
On the back the motherboard has the standard two PS/2 connectors for mouse/keuboard, 1394 connector, S/PDIF connector, two eSATA connectors, four USB, single RJ-45 NIC connector and eight analog audio connectors. As usual for most new motherboards no COM and LPT ports are present.
