MSI K9N2 SLI Platinum

Mike Jennings | Sep 26, 2008 5:31 PM
MSI | http://www.ozdirect.com.au
RRP: $162 (time of review)
Performance:  3
Features & Design:  4
Value for money:  2
Overall Rating: 
User Rating:  No user ratings.
A decent board, but the Hybrid SLI feature doesn’t justify the high asking price
MSI’s latest AMD motherboard is the first we’ve seen with Nvidia’s nForce 750a chipset, the chief benefit of which is Hybrid SLI. This lets you combine the board’s integrated graphics with a discrete GeForce card to give better 3D performance.

It sounds exciting: in practice it’s anything but. The onboard GPU is a low-powered GeForce 8200 part, and it won’t partner with anything more powerful than an 8500 GT card. This doesn’t provide enough of a performance boost to make it a worthwhile addition to your PC – a $100 8600 GT running on its own will provide better performance.

Thankfully, the K9N2 SLI Platinum offers a decent range of benefits to make up for this uninspiring headline feature. Its backplane has a generous selection of ports, including DVI output, FireWire and two eSATA sockets. There are only four USB ports, but three internal headers allow for up to six more, two of which are on a supplied rear bracket.

It also has small onboard Power and Reset buttons – handy for tinkerers – and a button to clear the CMOS. There’s no internal POST readout, though, as found on some of MSI’s other high-end boards.

Expansion options are mostly typical: there are two pairs of dual-channel DDR2 DIMM slots, capable of running 8GB of RAM at up to 1066MHz with a Socket AM2+ processor. In addition to the two PCI Express 16x slots, there’s a single PCI Express 1x socket and two standard PCI slots.

And, on top of its six SATA ports (four of them side-mounted, so as not to interfere with graphics cards), the K9N2 Platinum offers two IDE connectors. Since most modern boards offer only one, this could make it a suitable board if you’re upgrading and bringing across multiple drives from an older system.

Cooling, meanwhile, is covered by MSI’s Circu-Pipe system – a good way to keep the chipset cool, but it involves two heatsinks that rise up from the board a mere 40mm away from the CPU socket on two sides. That could prove a problem if you want to use a wide CPU cooler.

The price, however, is this board’s main problem; there’s little here to justify paying $162 for. We’d advise buying a standard board and a decent graphics card instead.

This article appeared in the October, 2008 issue of PC Authority.