14 DAY TRIAL // MSI has decided to terminate support for its K9A2 CF motherboards running CPUs with a thermal envelope higher than 125 Watts. This means that the K9A2 CF users won't be able to get support if they are using AMD Athlon 64 6000+, 6400+ and older FX-62 processors.
The company's decision is extremely odd, since the motherboard has undergone stress tests with an 125W processor seated on its socket, and everything went excellent. It is true that these processors are more than twice hotter than nowadays' energy saving parts, but the tests performed on the motherboard shows that it can take the extra heat flawlessly.
The situation is a little different on MSI's side of the fence. The company received user reports alleging that the board used to fail when using high thermal envelope processors. Moreover, online retail stores have been bombed with complains from users that have had incidents with the motherboard, even when using simple applications that need no special processing power.
MSI could but remove support for the mentioned CPUs. The official position of the company is that it cannot guarantee the board's durability if using a high thermal envelope processor. "We cannot guarantee the long-term durability of using a 125W part in the two year warranty. The original power design on K9A2 CF is limited to AM2's 89W and AM2+'s 95W specifications set".
The extra heat dissipated by the CPU and the extra power it uses make the power regulation components hotter than normal, and this leads to a premature wear-out. The lack of additional cooling solutions for the PWMs also contributes to this aspect. It seems that this is a design flaw that MSI is responsible for, since these "banned" CPUs hit the market way before the motherboard was introduced.
Moreover, a future upgrade to the upcoming Phenom 9700 and 9900 processors is totally out of discussion, since they exceed the 125W TDP when overclocked. All in all, you'd better skip the MSI offering for the AMD 790X until they release a new version of it. And don't forget that there are plenty of other AMD 790X offerings out there, such as the the Gigabyte GA-790X-DS4, that is compatible with every AMD product on the market.