Before the motherboard was overclocked, the processor multiplier was first set to 8x and the memory to run at DDR2-800 MHz mode. The MSI K9A2 Platinum actually turned out to be a pretty good overclocker, and there was little that had to be done to the motherboard to get the board well past the 300 MHz mark.

To overclock the MSI K9A2 Platinum motherboard we booted up and went into MSI's Cell Menu section of the BIOS where all the overclocking and memory timing controls are. The AMD Athlon64 X2 5000+ processor was initially set to run with an 8X CPU ratio, and the Corsair XM2-6400C4 memory set to run at 800MHz speeds. From there we adjusted the CPU speed in 5-10MHz increments and began overclocking! The the MSI K9A2 Platinum motherboard proved it was up to the challenge and easily rose from the starting point of 200MHz to 325MHz FSB without any issues whatsoever.

At 330MHz, the K9A2 Platinum became a little unstable, so we changed the CPU ratio from 8X to 5X. At 345MHz te system became unstable again, so memory voltage was increased to 1.9V, and Northbridge to 1.2V. After that the memory Ratio was changed from 'auto' to a 1:1 ratio, and we were able to reach 355MHz, then 360MHz. At a bus speed of 365MHz the system to crash while loading Windows Vista so we left things at a healthy 360MHz overclock. Nice!

If you like to tweak, you're going to head straight into the MSI Core Cell menu in the BIOS. You can adjust the FSB from 200-600 MHz in 1 MHz increments and here you can also adjust the CPU Ratio.

Here in the voltage control section are the memory/chipset/CPU voltage options. You can increase the CPU voltage to 1.676V above stock, memory 3.10V, northbridge to 1.525V, Hypertransport to 1.525V. That's a lot of voltage (especially the CPU and memory) so use caution when increasing the values. The last thing you want is to fry your shiny new hardware!

Prelude to Benchmarks

The details of how the MSI K9A2 Platinum motherboard test system was configured for benchmarking; the specific hardware, software drivers, operating system and benchmark versions is indicated below. In the second column are the general specs for the reference platforms this AMD 790FXn based motherboard is to be compared against. Please take a moment to look over PCSTATS test system configurations before moving on to the individual benchmark results on the next page.

PCSTATS Test System Configurations

test system reference system #1 reference system #2 processor: amd Athlon64 X2 5000+ Intel Pentium D 940 Clock Speed: 14 x 200 MHz = 2.8 GHz 16 x 200 MHz = 3.2 GHz Motherboard: MSI K9A2 Platinum (AMD 790FX) ASRock AM2V890-VSTA (VIA K8T890) Biostar Tforce 6100 (GF 6100) MSI K9N SLI Platinum (NF 570 SLI) Foxconn C51XEM2AA (NF 590 SLI) Asus M2N32 WS Professional (NF 590 SLI) Foxconn 975X7AA-8EKRS2H (975X) Videocard: MSI NX7800GTX-VT2D256E Memory: Corsair Twin2X2048-8500 Hard Drive: 74GB Western Digital Raptor WD740 CDROM: AOpen Combo 52x PowerSupply: PC Power & Cooling TurboCool 510 SLI Heatsink: AMD Athlon64 FX-62 Reference Thermaltake Jungle 512 Software Setup: Microsoft WindowsXP SP2 nVIDIA Forceware 169.25 Microsoft WindowsXP SP2 nVIDIA Forceware 9.35 nVIDIA Forceware 169.25 Microsoft WindowsXP SP2 Intel INF 7.22 nVIDIA Forceware 91.27 Benchmarks: SYSMark 2004 Super Pi SiSoft Sandra 2005 PCMark05 3DMark06 FarCry Doom 3 Quake 4