MSI K9AGM2-FIH Motherboard Review

Conclusions

It is always important to have in mind the audience a given product is targeted to. MSI K9AGM2-FIH and AMD 690G are clearly targeted to digital home PCs, where gaming isn’t the most important factor. For this PC class, video quality, connectivity options and size are more relevant.

For the user willing to build a digital home PC using an AMD 690G-based motherboard, MSI K9AGM2-FIH is a far better option than competing products such as ASUS M2A-VM, ECS AMD690GM-M2 and Foxconn A690GM2MA. Let’s see why.

First it has an on-board HDMI connector with digital audio support. This is a must-have for all users willing to build a top notch digital home PC. As AMD 690G provides internally two independent video controllers you can have one image at the VGA output and a completely different image on the HDMI output.

Secondly, the on-board audio from this motherboard has a better quality than the one provided by competing motherboards, because it is based on Realtek ALC888 codec and not on ALC883 as other motherboards we’ve seen around. Translation: you can use this motherboard to capture and edit your analog audio with a low noise level (90 dB signal-to-noise ratio). Of course users thinking of working professionally with analog audio capturing and editing should look for a sound card with at least 95 dB SNR on its inputs.

Another advantage of its on-board audio is its full support to 7.1 analog speakers, providing six independent audio jacks on its rear panel. Some motherboards around (like ASUS M2A-VM) have only three jacks, making it impossible for you to hook up a 7.1 analog speaker system and also killing your mic in and line in inputs when using a 5.1 analog system.

Another strong side of this motherboard is its 3D performance – compared to other motherboards with on-board video, of course. AMD 690G is clearly optimized to DirectX 9.0 (Shader 2.0) and this motherboard achieved a performance far higher than motherboards based on Radeon X1100, on GeForce 6100 and on GeForce 7025 on our DirectX 9 simulations. Of course don’t expect much from on-board video: even the “worst” video card available on the market is far faster than AMD 690G.

The overall construction quality of this motherboard is also worth mentioning, as it uses ferrite coils instead of iron coils on its voltage regulator circuit, providing 25% less power loss, and good electrolytic capacitors from Japanese vendors (but on the audio section, where Taiwanese caps from G-Luxon are used).

We could only find one major flaw with this motherboard: the presence of only two memory sockets. So if you want to upgrade your memory in the future you will need to remove your old modules and install new ones, as this motherboard won’t allow you to keep your old memories. MSI has another motherboard called K9AGM3 with the same specs of K9AGM2-FIH but with four memory sockets instead of two. If flexible memory upgrade capability is something you are looking for maybe this other model may be a better pick for you.

Another flaw could be the absence of overclocking. On a second though, this isn’t in fact a real flaw, as users building a digital home PC won’t probably overclock their systems anyway.

The absence of SPDIF connectors could also be considered another flaw, but since this motherboard provides digital audio through its HDMI connector users using HDMI probably won’t miss SPDIF. However, it could be interesting to have an on-board SPDIF connector for users that want to have a motherboard with HDMI output today but don’t have all the necessary equipment to use all capabilities provided by HDMI right now – i.e., don’t have a HDTV set, videoprojector or home theather receiver with HDMI support yet.

If the flaws listed above aren’t a problem for you, this motherboard is surely the best option if you are looking for a motherboard to build a multimedia center based on a socket AM2 CPU.