Introduction
Now that AMD and ATi are more than just good friends, the latter's chipsets are likely to be receiving considerably greater favour from the former. With the release of the CrossFire Xpress 3200 chipset aka RD580, ATi finally gave AMD fans good reason not to use the Nforce, too. The same chipset supports the latest Socket AM2 processors, so here we see it in a new high-end board from MSI, the MSI K9A Platinum. If CrossFire isn't your dual-graphics brand of choice, MSI also offers a similarly specified board called the K9N Platinum based on Nvidia's Nforce 570 chipset. There are both SLI and non-SLI versions available of the latter, too. But enough of the alternatives. Let's find out what the K9A Platinum has to offer.