MSI K9N2GM, Micro-ATX motherboard review

Page 3 - Testing

Test rig:

• CPU: AMD Athlon X2 4600+ (2.4GHz) F3 stepping
• Ram: 4GB Transcend JetRam PC6400 DDR2 800
• Motherboard: MSI K9N2GM / MSI K9A2 Platinum
• HDD: WD 320GB WD3201ABYS
• PSU: Chieftec GPS 450W
• OS: Windows Vista 32-bit

Cinebench

Let's start off with Maxon Cinebench. It's based on the animation software Cinema 4D, used in a number of movies such as Spider-Man, Star Wars and The Chronicles of Narnia. It has a component that tests the processor performance and has also good multi-threading support.

The difference in the class of the two tested motherboards is huge. The performance is not all that shockingly low.

PDNBench

PDNBench is a benchmark based on the popular 64 bit free software for picture editing Pain.NET. PDNBench tests the and displays the sum of time required for performing a variety of different operations, commonly used when editing pictures - scaling, zooming, decreasing, cutting, compressing and so on.

Situation is quite similar here too.

Lame

As the name suggests, this is the famously known software for audio encoding in LAME, with multi-threading support. We used the benchmark with the supplied 20MB .WAV fail, compressed in .MP3 of course.

As with the tests above, AMD 790FX leads but its smaller brother follows closely.

WinRAR

Is there anything we can say about WinRAR, that you don't already know... The integrated benchmark has multi-threading support and is quite indicative. We measured the time for compressing 100MB source.

SuperPI

The famous SuperPI... We used the version from our colleagues from XtremeSystems, that supports multi-threading.

As whole the motherboard cannot play along with its high-end brethren. But then again, at that price and with this form-factor, the lower performance is to be expected.