MSI K9A Platinum Motherboard (Athlon 64/64FX/64 X2, Socket AM2, nForce2, ATX, 8GB DDR2, 1000MHz Bus)

• Reviewed by: Doplar

  Strengths: Crossfire 3200 chipsetCool and quietSolid

  Weaknesses: None for me

  Overall: I bought this board with a dual core 5600 amd processor, 2 gig of kingston 800 ram, sataII 160 hd, and dropped a radeon x1650 pro turbo (iceq) graphics card in it. It is a sweet machine. No problems what so ever. Set it up with xp home edition. Have no interest in Vista since the great majority of users have complained about that OS since it hit the market.Don't blame this board for problems caused by the Vista OS. Before Vista came along you never heard anyone complain that XP wouldn't install on there machine new or old. Vista gets one star not the K9A PL. Its a very good MB.

• Reviewed by: Ultimate_Entertainment

  Strengths: The only Motherboard by MSI (in the USA, anyway) to offer the latest ATI Crossfire chipset (currently the Xpress 3200), is ATI Crossfire Certified, & supports the recent socket AM2 platform by AMD.

  Weaknesses: Might need to update BIOS w/a more current version for proper hardware compatibility; Wasn?t able to successfully install the new (Full) Windows Vista Premium OS in conjunction w/it's RAID & Crossfire.

  Overall: I bought this motherboard, thinking it would be more than adequate for the soon-to-be released Windows Vista OS, but after weeks of trying to do a full, clean install of the 32-bit version of (Microsoft) Windows Vista Premium, I was unsuccessful & tried to get Geek Squad, a local technical support agency, to try installing the new Vista OS, but after nine days of attempts, not even they could do it either. My hardware setup more than qualified at meeting the minimum requirements for the new Windows Vista OS, but for some unknown reason, it just doesn?t seem to work correctly with my RAID & Crossfire setup, so I?m just going to try installing a full version of Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005, instead. Bottom line: it?ll work OK if you plan to use Windows XP and, perhaps one day, upgrade it to the Vista OS once it?s more compatible and most of the bugs have been worked out, but I wouldn?t recommend getting it if you plan to use a Full Version of Windows Vista with this particular MB, especially if you also plan on having more than one hard disc/drive & also plan on getting either an ATI Crossfire or nVidea S.L.I. setup too.