MSI announces first Quad CrossFire motherboard

Posted at: 3:47am 9th October 2007 by Ben Hardwidge

K9A2 Platinum board uses AMD’s new 790FX chipset, and supports quad-core Phenom CPUs

Just three months ago, AMD slyly announced that Quad CrossFire would be a possibility in the future via a presentation slide, but MSI’s latest AM2+ motherboard shows that it’s about to become a reality.

The K9A2 Platinum is based on AMD’s new 790FX chipset, which supports the company’s new native quad-core Phenom CPUs, including the dual power plane needed to adjust the voltage of each core individually. However, the board will also support older AM2 Athlon 64 and Sempron CPUs.

The big news, though, is that the board sports four PCI-E graphics slots, complete with a single-slot space in between each one, meaning that four cards with dual-slot coolers could be placed in the board. MSI confirmed that AMD had more than two cards in mind for CrossFire, saying that ‘AMD will soon launch their triple card CrossFire soon in the coming season… but we are ready on Quad CrossFire with PCI-E Gen2 bandwidth once AMD is ready.’

The four PCI-E slots will have eight lanes each if used in Quad CrossFire configuration, or the lane–allocation can alternatively be split into two 16-lane slots. As well as support for Phenom and Quad CrossFire, the board also offers 7.1 surround sound, four DIMMS slots that can accommodate up to 8GB of 1,066MHz DDR2 RAM and a new Circu-Pipe cooling system based on copper heatpipes. However, MSI now appears to have abandoned the quirky ‘rollercoaster’ heatsink found on the P35 Diamond.

Richard Stewart from MSI told Custom PC that the board would be officially launched on 1 November, and that boards would be available on the same date. No UK pricing has been announced yet, but Stewart estimated that they will cost between £70 and £80 ex VAT (£94 inc VAT).