ASUS A8R32-MVP: Taking the Overclocking Route via the 0404
by Gary Key on April 20, 2006 3:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Final Comments
ASUS has provided the user community with a BIOS release that in our testing has resulted in incremental improvements in overclocking while providing additional compatibility with various components. While the 0404 BIOS will not satisfy the expectations of a hardcore enthusiast, it at least shows us ASUS is listening to the community. The board had a terrific preview, a rocky introduction, and is now maturing quite nicely. Whether the board has any further potential in it is only a question ASUS can answer, an answer we have requested. We firmly believe the ATI CrossFire Xpress 3200 (RD580) has the capability; it will be a matter of time before we find out how good it really is in this board or others.
Our only remaining questions and those of others revolve around the board's capability to exceed the 300HTT level with the memory set synchronously while maintaining a command rate of 1T. Our board had the capability to do it but we just barely made it and are still concerned with the anomalies of the 9x CPU multiplier. We do not know if this issue is with the board design, BIOS settings, or chipsets, but otherwise this board performs extremely well in all phases of usage. Since we mentioned the issue of users reporting the inability to run at a command rate of 1T with a synchronous memory setting over 300HTT, we decided to do an experiment to see what effect running at a command rate of 2T would have on the benchmark scores. Here are the final results.
In our game results there is only a 1%~2% penalty for running the system with the command rate set at 2T while the Sandra benchmarks report penalties up to 15%. Those results are pretty typical for memory subsystem improvements, as CPU cache and other aspects of the system come into play. The performance difference is something that is not noticeable in day to day activities without resorting to a benchmark. While this penalty might not be acceptable for the more avid enthusiast, it should not deter someone from purchasing this board or others based upon these results.
If you're wondering why we did an article like this, one of the reasons is to illustrate the importance of having a well tuned BIOS implementation and quality board components. You can use the best peripherals on the planet, but with a poorly coded BIOS or sub-par board components you will still achieve lackluster results. Did we achieve lackluster results? Not in our opinion, although we expected a little more from this board just as a lot of enthusiast users have since purchasing it.
With DFI and Abit shipping their RD580 socket 939 products now and with several other manufacturers planning to offer RD580 AM2 products at launch it will be interesting to see who can extract the most performance from this chipset. We currently have the DFI board in the lab for testing and will have the Abit shortly so stay tuned to see which board can best meet the expectations of the gamer and overclocking enthusiast.
ASUS has provided the user community with a BIOS release that in our testing has resulted in incremental improvements in overclocking while providing additional compatibility with various components. While the 0404 BIOS will not satisfy the expectations of a hardcore enthusiast, it at least shows us ASUS is listening to the community. The board had a terrific preview, a rocky introduction, and is now maturing quite nicely. Whether the board has any further potential in it is only a question ASUS can answer, an answer we have requested. We firmly believe the ATI CrossFire Xpress 3200 (RD580) has the capability; it will be a matter of time before we find out how good it really is in this board or others.
Our only remaining questions and those of others revolve around the board's capability to exceed the 300HTT level with the memory set synchronously while maintaining a command rate of 1T. Our board had the capability to do it but we just barely made it and are still concerned with the anomalies of the 9x CPU multiplier. We do not know if this issue is with the board design, BIOS settings, or chipsets, but otherwise this board performs extremely well in all phases of usage. Since we mentioned the issue of users reporting the inability to run at a command rate of 1T with a synchronous memory setting over 300HTT, we decided to do an experiment to see what effect running at a command rate of 2T would have on the benchmark scores. Here are the final results.
In our game results there is only a 1%~2% penalty for running the system with the command rate set at 2T while the Sandra benchmarks report penalties up to 15%. Those results are pretty typical for memory subsystem improvements, as CPU cache and other aspects of the system come into play. The performance difference is something that is not noticeable in day to day activities without resorting to a benchmark. While this penalty might not be acceptable for the more avid enthusiast, it should not deter someone from purchasing this board or others based upon these results.
If you're wondering why we did an article like this, one of the reasons is to illustrate the importance of having a well tuned BIOS implementation and quality board components. You can use the best peripherals on the planet, but with a poorly coded BIOS or sub-par board components you will still achieve lackluster results. Did we achieve lackluster results? Not in our opinion, although we expected a little more from this board just as a lot of enthusiast users have since purchasing it.
With DFI and Abit shipping their RD580 socket 939 products now and with several other manufacturers planning to offer RD580 AM2 products at launch it will be interesting to see who can extract the most performance from this chipset. We currently have the DFI board in the lab for testing and will have the Abit shortly so stay tuned to see which board can best meet the expectations of the gamer and overclocking enthusiast.
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SLI - Monday, July 10, 2006 - link
New BIOS v502. Available here:ftp://ftp.asus.com.tw/pub/ASUS/mb/so...-MVP%20DELU...">ftp://ftp.asus.com.tw/pub/ASUS/mb/so...-MVP%20DELU...
abakshi - Thursday, April 20, 2006 - link
Anything new for the A8R-MVP?I'm having some performance issues with my system (A64-X2 4400+, A8R-MVP, 2 GB OCZ EL Platinum DDR400, 250GB WD 7200/16/SATA2, ATI X1800XT 512, Enermax 450W, Win XP SP2).
Specifically, it multitasks very poorly in Windows -- e.g. whenever I insert a CD in the drive, the system basically freezes until the autoplay is done reading. Despite the dual-core A64 setup, it's actually worse at multitasking than my older P4 2.8C / 865PE (P4P800-D) machine. I've tried formatting and reinstalling Win XP, swapping out RAM sticks, different HDDs, etc.
Games are generally fine, but I do have some stuttering issues, and benches are lower than they should be. I set the RAM timings manually to spec at stock clock (no OC until this is fixed) and made sure everything else was set up right -- no effect.
The board's been disappointing, and I've seen a lot of other people have issues with it. I've had so many solid Asus Intel-based boards (P4P800-D, P4C800-D, P4T533-C, etc.), and I saw AT and others' reviews of this, so I figured it would be a halfway decent board. It's only faster than my old P4 system in games -- and that too, probably from the video card boost more than anything (X1800XT vs 9800 Pro).
Gary Key - Friday, April 21, 2006 - link
We have discovered stuttering issues in games and internet applets when utilizing the ADI on-board audio along with the latest version of JAVA 1.5 being loaded on the system. It has been tracked down to the ADI audio driver. Asus is working with ADI on a fix.
Are you using the AMD X2 driver or Microsoft Dual-Core patch? If not, you will get stuttering and lower than normal performance in certain games and applications.
Please email us and we can work on your issues with you directly.
goinginstyle - Thursday, May 4, 2006 - link
Any updates?XrayDoc - Thursday, April 20, 2006 - link
Are you sure your tested revision number was 1.3G? I just bought the same board from Newegg. It is a revision 1.03G.Gary Key - Thursday, April 20, 2006 - link
Sorry about that, 1.03G, article corrected. :)mino - Thursday, April 20, 2006 - link
AFAIK K8 memory controler operates in synchronous mode all the time - there is no such a thing as an asynchronous mode in this architecture.What you referred to was ratio between clock generator frequency and memory frequency. However memory freq. depends only on the CPU freq. and memory divider employed, clockgen(also called FSB in BIOS-es) freq is irrelevant here as far as memory performance is concerned.
I hope you consider this in the future when you refer to various memory speed ratios tested.
Gary Key - Thursday, April 20, 2006 - link
I appreciate the comments. We fully understand the technicalities of the K8 memory architecture and would have utilized the "correct" terminology. In doing so our sentence structures would have turned into small paragraphs. ;-) We knew our terminology would be an issue with certain readers. However, we decided to go with synchronous or 1:1 as the majority of people are extremely familiar with this terminology when discussing memory settings, right or wrong. I will see about adding an additional statement clarifying the architecture design and setup.
FireTech - Thursday, April 20, 2006 - link
Gary, I know you're busy but what's the rough timeframe for the All Crossfire MB Round-up appearing?Gary Key - Thursday, April 20, 2006 - link
Hi,The lab is backed up right now. ;-) The DFI article will be out next week, Abit following in about a week we hope (board delay). If you want Intel CrossFire we also have the little Yonah that could article coming up shortly.
Thanks....