Take a quick look at one of the newest motherboards you'll see anywhere, and one of the very first socket AM2 motherboards that will be available. To be honest, I was expecting to be dissapointed, and though performance may end up not being what it could be on paper, my initial impressions of MSI's K9 series AM2 motherboard, the “K9N SLI Platinum”, are that it will scream. Out of the box it supports up to a 8GB of DDR-2 RAM, and it supports that up to DDR2-800 (faster than anything you find on existing AMD or Intel platforms), more than enough SATA-II bricks, and something called “Dual CoreCell”, which supposedly is a hardware/software combination that helps to improve performance of dual core systems.

Aside from that, the entire series is standard “run of the mill”, sans using the newest nVidia nForce 550 chipset. Either way, it's going to be a pleasure seeing how AM2 boards end up performing compared to their 939 predecessors. It's also going to be very interesting how Intel and AMD CPUs compete in memory performance, now that they are both using DDR-2. MSI usually produces good stuff so I doubt we'll be dissapointed.