MSI K9A2 CF

Testing Methods:

With the exception of SiSoft Sandra, all of our benchmarks have been engineered to give you numbers that you are likely to find useful when actually using the products we have evaluated in the real world.

We are also focusing a lot more of our time on evaluating the stability of the motherboards (and platforms) using a stress test designed to highlight any of the potential weaknesses that the product may have. That involves a gradually increasing amount of stress starting with Prime95 torture test on all cores and expanding to a looping 3DMark06. This is to ensure that all parts of the system are stressed simultaneously over a period of time.

We believe that the consumer is never likely to subject their platform to this level of stress and we are not expecting every product to complete an entire extended stress test. However, most poorly engineered products fail within the first couple of hours, or even minutes, allowing us to make a conscious decision on whether a motherboard (or platform) is worth your money, regardless of how well it performs in our benchmarks.

Test Setup:

Motherboards:

• MSI K9A2 CF - BIOS 1.1
  
• Gigabyte MA790FX-DQ6 - BIOS F2L
  
• Asus M2N32-SLI Deluxe - BIOS 1101

Common Components:

• AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+
  
• 2GB DDR2 800MHz at 3-3-3-9-1T timings, where possible
  
• Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT
  
• Two AMD Radeon HD 3850 256MB in CrossFire
  
• PC Power and Cooling Silencer 750W PSU
  
• Seagate 7200.9 250GB SATA Hard Drive
  
• Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit
  
• Nvidia Forceware 169.09
  
• ATI Catalyst 7.11

At the time of writing the latest BIOS for the MSI K9A2 CF is the 1.1 release - we easily managed to set the memory to 3-3-3-9-1T at 2.3V and had it run all day that fast with no problems.