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 $128
USD. 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.
If
you have any comments, be sure to hit us up in our forums.
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