Final Words

Overall, the MSI K9A2 Platinum was a mixed bag. As shown through our benchmarks, at stock speeds, the K9A2 Platinum was rather speedy and very solid. We did not have any stability issues, even under full load. The translation lookaside buffer issue never reared its ugly head. For grins and giggles we ran some tests with the TLB fix enabled in the BIOS to see what sort of performance impact there would be using the Phenom 9600.

	No TLB Fix	TLB Fix
Photoshop (lower is better)	173.3	191.4
PiFast (lower is better)	37.7	41.2
Crysis (higher is better)	74.23	65.12

It's clear the TLB fix impacts performance, especially when heavy memory use is required. In day-to-day, I'd be hard pressed spotting the drop in speed, but nonetheless, it is not a good thing and will hopefully be resolved when AMD corrects it later this quarter.

While stock performance was good, overclocking was an adventure. We used both AMD's Overdrive and traditional BIOS manipulation for overclocking and neither worked out as we expected. The Phenom 9600 Black we tested with easily allowed us to reach 2.6GHz by adjusting the ratio to 13. It wasn't completely stable, but 12.5x200 was. When we tried to push the FSB, we had no luck initially. Our first try never allowed us to get by 219MHz, while keeping the multiplier at default. We bumped the voltages up, but the board would never get by POST. When we tried 220MHz in AMD's Overdrive, the system just hung after applying the change. There were a couple of frightening moments where the system would just shut down and not even respond to the keyboard until it fully rebooted back into Windows.

We reached out to MSI on a couple occasions and got a couple BIOS updates. The first update added the TLB fix as an option, but it did let us get up to 221FSB. We received a second BIOS fix earlier this week and managed to get 228MHz, just short of the 230MHz MSI managed in their labs.

The cool running Circu-Pipe mentioned earlier was searing hot at this point. We highly suggest using some active cooling if overclocking. We did place a 120mm case fan over the Circu-Pipe assembly, and though it probably disrupted some of the CPU airflow, it did help to cool down the heatsinks on the motherboard. It did not help us get by 228MHz on the FSB though.

If there is any consolation though, overclocking is very easy and intuitive, whether you use D.O.T.3, Overdrive or doing it the old fashion way. Stick with multiplier overclocking, and it's relatively problem-free. FSB overclocking is not as easy, though it will take more testing for us to determine if this is the platform or the MSI board itself.

The rest of the package is pretty much standard fare, though it is the only 790FX board I am aware of that supports 4-way CrossFireX. MSI does need to update their Live Update utility as well as the AMD Overdrive tool that shipped with our board. We also had a strange issue where the latest Live Update didn't even recognize our BIOS version installed, though that can probably be explained by the fact we've been using a beta BIOS.

Going back to performance, at stock speeds, the K9A2 Platinum performed very well with the Phenom 9600 Black, despite the TLB issue which never affected us. The 790FX platform as a whole is quite solid and shows a lot of promise. Provided you're planning to stay closely within specifications, we think the MSI K9A2 Platinum AMD 790FX motherboard is a solid and reliable platform but the overclocking results surely vary depending on the processor you have. We'd be more inclined to recommend a Black Edition processor if you're considering the MSI K9A2 Platinum as FSB overclocking success is not a slam dunk.

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