MSI K9A2 CF motherboard

Package contents
Motherboard
Win XP / Vista driver DVD
1x SATA cable
1x IDE cable
1x power cable molex/SATA
User's manual



Features:
AMD Phenom/Athlon/Sempron processors based on AM2 or AM2+ socket
North Bridge AMD 790X
South Bridge AMD SB600
4x DDR2 533/667/800/1066MHz (1066MHz support only with AM2+ processors)
Realtek TRL80111B Gigabit network controller
Realtek ALC888 HD 7.1 Audio codec
4x SATA 3Gbps ports supporting RAID 0, 1, 0 + 1
2x PCIE x16 2.0 slots supporting AMD Crossfire technology
1x PCIE x1
2x PCI slots


Motherboard Layout:

You will notice immediately that on the K9A2 motherboard it looks quite unpopulated. However, that means that you'll have enough space to fit just about anything. MSI did a good job by placing all the pin and power connectors on the edges of the board. SATA connectors are placed so as to not get in the way of PCIe x16 slots, just in case you decide to use a big-PCB graphics card. IDE connector is at 90 degrees to the motherboard, and it makes plugging in IDE devices much easier. Motherboard has 4-phase VRM and there are no add-ons for memory or NB. 12V of power for the CPU is 4-pin, whereas up until now it’s been 8-pin.

PCIe X160 ports are identical, but painted in different colors and routed directly through NB. The board also features a single PCIe x1 just above the second PCIe x16 slot, and two PCI slots directly underneath. The layout has been designed to provide ample space, except for the first PCI. In case you decide to use a dual-slot graphics card, you’ll be left without the first PCI slot, that’s placed just under the second PCIe x16.



NB and SB cooling has been solved by using simple cooling solutions, but since AMD 790X and SB600 don’t generate much heat, this will be plenty. MSI equipped this board with Realtek’s ALC888 sound chip, and it will provide better sound performance, but still isn’t enough for Dolby and DTS. Since this is a budget solution, it’s gone only one Gigabit network controller based on Realteks TRL80111B.

The back of the board also seems unpopulated and it features 4x USB connectors, 2x PS/2, 1x RS232 port and 6x 3.5-mm sound card connectors.

Sapphire ATI Radeon HD3850 512MB

The graphics card we received with this rig is Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 3850. ATI Radeon HD 38x0 are based on 55-nm RV670 graphics chip with 320 Stream processors, they’re still using a 256-bit memory interface. Our test sample had 512MB of GDDR3 graphics memory.



The graphics core runs at 668MHz, while memory runs at 1656MHz. Radeon HD 38x0 series supports DirectX 10.1, as well as Shader Model 4.1. The cooling solution is the active reference one, and the cooler covers most of the graphics card’s PCB, as well as the memory modules.



Those who like overclocking, beware - although this cooler does its job well, it is somewhat noisy. The card’s PCB is a bit longer than our test rig’s motherboard’s PCB. Still, as we’ve mentioned before, MSI did a great job with the layout, so the size of our graphics card didn’t present a problem.

Package Contents



Graphics card
Installation DVD
1x CrossFire bridge
1x VGA-to-DVI dongle
1x DVI-to-HDMI dongle
1x SATA power connector-to-6pin
1x S-video-to-RGB

AMD Phenom 9500 QuadCore

Our testing processor has four cores running at 2200MHz. Phenom has 2MB of L3 Cache, but we received the DR-B2 revision that’s not too overclocking-friendly, but we’ll do our best to squeeze out a couple of more MHz.