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Joel Hruska - Oct 9, 2007 8:05 pm UTC

It's a bit early to be talking about products based on AMD's RD790 chipset, since the chipset hasn't even launched yet, but it appears MSI couldn't quite keep things a secret. Information on the company's upcoming K9A2 Platinum has "accidently" been leaked to the press, with accompanying photos and a list of the board's features.

According to TechConnect Magazine, the K9A2 Platinum is built on the high-end version of the RD790 chipset, otherwise known as the 790 FX. Given this, the motherboard will support all current AM2 and future AM2+ processors, including the x2, x3, and x4 Phenom flavors due to be released in the fourth quarter of 2007 and the first quarter of 2008. In addition, the high-end version of the 790 chipset supports 4 PCIe x16 (electrical x8) slots, DDR2 at 800 / 1066 speeds, and HyperTransport 3.0. Integrated 7.1 audio, gigabit Ethernet, 10 USB2 ports, dual FireWire, one PATA connector, and six total SATA ports round out the motherboard. Two PCI slots and a single 1x PCIe slot are also available, though if you actually deployed a Quadfire system you'd have no choice but to drop such components directly between two cards, thus limiting airflow. From the look of things, it'd also be impossible to run both a floppy drive and a dual-slot video card in the fourth PCIe slot—not that floppy drives are all that popular these days.

I can't help wondering, at this point, what type of power supply it would take to run four 2900XT boards in Quadfire mode. Given the power requirements and the amount of heat such a rig would generate, this type of setup would seem best fit for cards based on RV670, or possibly the upcoming R700.

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