You remember two weeks ago we told you some boards are not safe with 125W+ CPUs here. Of course we thought such problems will not occur with a flagship motherboard such as the MSI K9A2 Platinum.



While testing our tri-core we also compared it to our Phenom 9850 Black Edition. We checked out the MSI webpage here to be sure the CPU will be compatible and did some tests.

The board looks really nice and we thought the 4+1 phase design is sufficient. Of course having a Phenom X4 9850 Black Edition you will overclock - because that's what the "Black Editions" are sold for.



We got the CPU up to 3.1GHz, and could also run some Crysis benchmarks. After that we tried our x264 bench and after about ten minutes the board shut down. This is nothing uncommon, especially when the overheating functions of a board kicks in and the CPU got really hot. After clearing CMOS we could boot into the BIOS screen and save all settings, but it would not boot into Windows, so this is a sure sign the VRM is badly damaged.

So be advised when purchasing a 790FX board now and running an AMD Phenom X4 9850 Black Edition, the board will run at nominal speeds, but overclocking may kill it.