MSI K9A2 CF review

The K9A2 CF is marketed as an affordable gaming motherboard. The CF in the name stands for CrossFire, and in fact the board supports not only CrossFire, but the new CrossFire X, which means it's able to drive two dual-GPU Radeon HD 3870 X2 cards at once. Unfortunately, a tight budget has led to some corner-cutting on bandwidth: plug in a pair of graphics cards and both PCI Express slots drop to 8x speed.

This disappointment aside, the K9A2 CF is a pretty standard AMD motherboard. All the important features are present, although none of them in particularly generous quantities. It provides just four rear USB ports and four SATA channels, while RAID is limited to modes 0, 1 and 10. The manual describes eSATA and FireWire as "optional" - neither was present on our sample board. Sadly, despite this sparse feature set, power consumption when idle was high at 106W.

The BIOS is, at least, well equipped, enabling you to adjust all the usual frequencies and tweak the CPU multiplier. A simple automatic overclocking feature is also provided: speed increases are described by ranks, from Private - which offers a mere 1% speed increase - up to a Commander-level 15% boost. You don't get any whizzy Windows-based tools, though, as you do with the Gigabyte boards.

The K9A2 CF does an adequate job, but we'd be hard pushed to recommend it to anyone. If you're determined to experience CrossFire, we'd suggest investing a little extra money in a motherboard that can really make the most of it. Otherwise, the Gigabyte GA-EP35C-DS3R will give you more bang for your buck.

Author: Darien Graham-Smith