Overclocking
Overclocking with air cooling isn't the easiest of tasks, especially when AMD's memory controller onboard the chip rears its head every now and then. We did have some hopes though since we used Zalman's excellent CNPS9500 for AM2 and we were not let down. We maxed out at a max overclock of 224FSB, which equates to a total of 2.46GHz. We did manage to get to 226FSB, but it was too much for our system and we experienced a hard crash. How bad was it? Bad enough that the Windows installation was corrupted.
Final Words
Despite not being based on NVIDIA's flagship chipset, the MSI K9N SLI Platinum has shown to be a very impressive board. The build quality and design is very good. Minor items, such as SATA connection placement, was well thought out by MSI. We liked the CMOS reset button, as it makes recovering from unbootable system changes very easy. The heatsinks scattered about do help in controlling the heat, though some active cooling is recommended if you're using a water cooler. The flat chipset cooler as well as the wide space between PEG slots leave more options for the user as well.
The move from DDR to DDR2 is beneficial for the AMD platform overall. While DDR2 in general has higher latencies than DDR, at these clock speeds, that does not become much of an issue. Low latency DDR2 isn't quite at the levels of low latency DDR, but it's getting there. The benchmarks showed the improvements as well as we used identically clocked CPUs for the Athlon platforms.
Stability was excellent, and unlike some earlier nForce 4 motherboards, we didn't have any data corruption issues while heavily taxing the network connections. The ASUS A8N32-SLI wasn't too problematic, but the ASUS P5N32-SLI caused nothing but grief in our original review. For the latter boards, we had to resort to using the Marvell NICs to avoid any problems, but given that NVIDIA removed ActiveArmor, this should not be as prevalent an issue with shipping boards based on the nForce 500 series.
Overclocking went well considering we stuck with air cooling. We did have some problems once we passed the comfort zone, but we've seen various levels of success depending on the CPU used. We did have a fixed ratio of 11, so our options are a bit more limited than those which FX CPUs.
There aren't really any flaws with the MSI K9N SLI Platinum from a design standpoint, but obviously high-end enthusiasts will be quick to point out what is missing. LinkBoost as mentioned at the start is not a feature supported by the 570 SLI. Another missing feature is dual x16 PCI Express, which is another 590 SLI only feature. However, these may not be that big a deal depending on the rest of your hardware. We have not experienced major performance gains from dual x8 and dual x16 SLI and according to NVIDIA, you will probably not see anything special unless you use high-end hardware (aka a fast CPU and 79xx video cards). Furthermore, you need the 7900 GTX (or higher) to take advantage of LinkBoost, so you can see that unless you have the right setup, you won't be losing much with the 570 SLI chipset.
While you will not be losing much, you will be gaining, or at least retaining, more cash. The MSI K9N SLI Platinum is quite a bargain at . Unless you have a couple of 7900 GTX cards, we see little reason to spring for a 590 SLI based board unless those video cards are in your upgrade path, or you just have money to burn. For the more budget, yet equally performance minded, the MSI K9N SLI Platinum is certainly worth a close look.
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