MSI has unveiled a new high-end motherboard for the AM2+ platform. MSI K9A2 Platinum is based on the AMD 790FX chipset and have four physical PCI Express x16 slots. AMD 790FX is the chipset we’ve previously known as RD790 and it’s the flagship of AMD’s new 7 series chipsets. It supports the coming AMD Phenom series, including the quad-cores, and has the AutoXpress feature which will accelerate the performance of both K8 and K10 CPUs. MSI K9A2 Platinum sports MSI’s monitoring and overclocking technology Dual CoreCell with D.O.T. Express, the OC software Dual CoreCenter, HD 7.1 audio and new Circu(s)-Pipe solution.
MSI emphasizes the support for triple card CrossFire, even though this hasn’t been officially announced yet, and together with the quad-core Phenom support, this board seems to carry a lot of potential. Unfortunately we don’t have Phenom or triple CrossFire, but when we do, 790FX certainly seems like a given platform to try out.
The four PCIe x16 ports can either work as a pair of ports with x16 bandwidth, or as four ports with x8 bandwidth. The board has a 5-phase PWM design, DDR2-1066 support (up to 8 GB), 6 SATAII ports with RAID 0/1/0+1,5, extra SATA hardware RAID with SAS, ten USB 2.0, and two IEEE1394 ports.
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