Our subject of today’s overclocking test the new MSI motherboard for AM2 which is based on ATI’s latest Crossfire chipset, the RD580 Xpress3200. This chipsets promises dual 16x lanes for PCI Express.

This black beauty represents the high end product line of MSI:



- ATI RD580 Xpress3200 chipset
- Supports AMD Socket AM2, Athlon64 FX/X2 and Sempron
- 2 PCI-E x16 full speed slots for CrossFire mode and dual VGA
- 4 dual channel DIMMs DDRII 533/667/800 up to 8GB
- Dual LAN 10/100/1000 and FireWire
- 8-channel High Definition Audio
- Supports 6 SATAII
- SATA 1~6 supports RAID 0/1/0+1,5
- 2 PCI-E x16, 2 PCI-E x1, 2 PCI slots
- 10x USB 2.0, 2x IEEE1394
- Dual CoreCell with D.O.T. Express
- Silent Heatsink design

The Main board shows sufficient space between the two PCI Express x16 slots, and there are 2 addition PCIe 16x slots and 2 PCI slots.



Look closer at the right lower corner the south bridge utilizes passive heatsink for cooling and you can also see 4 SATA connections



Power circuit and DDRII DIMMs - AM2 provides a single IDE port


Around the CPU socket you can see a 3-phase power circuit which uses high quality Japanese capacitors



I/O Plate features Dual Gigabit lan, 7.1 surround sound and firewire/usb connectors



A close-up of the RD580 North Bridge



South Bridge Chipset
The New IXP600
Supporting SATAII, hopefully an improvement over the previous IXP400

The new SB600 Southbridge supports 300Mbs/s SATA as well as improved USB/Firewire performance.