14 DAY TRIAL // MSI is reportedly planning to announce three new motherboard offerings in its line-up, that will come with full support for AMD's high-TDP quad-core Phenoms. Built around Nvidia's 7x0a SLI chipsets, the upcoming motherboards will work with a broad range of processors, from Sempron to the newly-introduced Phenoms.
The company's flagship offering will be the K9N2 Diamond, an ATX motherboard, that will be powered by Nvidia's 780a SLI chipset. As you probably know, the 780a is the first chipset from Nvidia with full support for the HybridPower technology. HybridPower lets the computer send the discrete graphics card to sleep when graphics computing tasks can be handled by the integrated GPU alone.
The K9N2 Diamond comes with full support for the three-way SLI enthusiast technology for unmatched gaming and graphics processing performance. More than that, enthusiasts can now pair the power of SLI with one of AMD's upcoming Phenom 9950 processor (140-watt TDP).
The next offering is the K9N2 Zilent, that will also come in an ATX form-factor. The Zilent is built around Nvidia's Nforce 750a SLI chipset with SLI support. The motherboard is also touted to support processors with up to 140 watts thermal envelopes.
Last, but not least, MSI will introduce the K9N2 SLI Platinum, another ATX-compatible motherboard built with the same 750a SLI chipset. Just like its previous siblings, the motherboard will be able to run any type of AMD processor seating on an AM2+ socket, from the slow Sempron, to the top-notch Phenom 9950.
As previously reported, most of the motherboards built on top of the AMD 780G and 790FX chipsets are not able to face the increased energy requirements of a Phenom 9850 Black Edition chip, mostly because of some design flaws in the VRM (Voltage Regulator Module).
However, the new motherboards from MSI will come with high quality PWMs surrounding the CPU socket, able to deliver the necessary energy even when running hot.