MSI K9N2 SLI Platinum

MSI's latest AMD motherboard is the first we've seen with Nvidia's nForce 750a chipset. The chief benefit this brings is Hybrid SLI, which lets you combine the board's integrated graphics with a discrete GeForce card to give better 3D performance.

It sounds exciting, but 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 £40 8600 GT running on its own will provide better performance.

Thankfully, the K9N2 SLI Platinum offers a decent range of features to make up for this uninspiring headline feature. The backplate 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 extra ports, two of which can be mounted on a supplied rear bracket.

It also has internal power and reset buttons - handy for tinkerers - and a push-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 1,066MHz 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 as well.

However, in addition to 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.

The board is cooled by MSI's proprietary Circu-Pipe system - a perfectly good way to keeping the chipset cool, but it involves two heatsinks that rise up from the board a mere 4cm away from the CPU socket on two sides. That could prove a problem if want to use a wide CPU cooler.

The SLI Platinum offers a solid range of features, but there's little here to justify paying over £100. If you really want Hybrid SLI it's a good way to get it, but at this price you're better off buying a standard board and a decent graphics card instead.

Author: Mike Jennings