Phenom 9500 w/ MSI K9A2 Platinum

[MagnumMan]

I blew a MOSFET under a water cooled VRM on the K9A2 Platinum, at 1.5V on the CPU with a 9850BE. Now I am running at 1.45V and it has been stable for a while, see specs below.

I think what bothers me the most about MSI and this board however was their willingness to put something into the BIOS like PCIe frequency selection, and then tell me later it would never get into the production BIOS. And forever now I had asked for a Northbridge selector (hell, just tie it to the HT mult!!!) because the 9850BE has a 10x NB/HT multiplier, which limits overclocking a bit... bit as you can see below I have done ok. I would prefer to run my memory at rated speed or better with is DDR2-1000, however the lack of a NB multiplier selector in the BIOS makes this impossible. I also feel they used cheap parts like the coils and MOSFETs to save money (the board is cheap, the Promise SAS controller standalone edition costs as much as the board alone and it's damn fast 150MB/s with 2 drives RAID0). I would have liked to see MSI take a Gigabyte stance on the components, or go to a Digital VRM like DFI did.

And before you razz me on the power supply, I did record 1010W draw with a Kill-a-Watt so I have a Thermaltake Toughpower 1000W now which will be going in this week along with a real drain port on the rear... and yes I have 4x 3870 at 1000/1225... unfortunately so far, I tried 3dMark Vantage just once and everything was all messed up graphically. The CrossfireX drivers still need work.