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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23 Comments
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cornfedone - Thursday, April 20, 2006 - link
It's been known by experienced PC builders for several years that Asus has been shipping mobos with a laundry lists of defects. This has been documented by any number of hardware review sites and hundreds of thousands of consumers. In addition Asus has been completely arrogant about these defective products, failing to properly fix or replace them and completely ignoring their customers after they were duped in to purchasing these defective products via misleading advertising and bogus reviews of hand-picked mobos.Asus needs a good class action lawsuit costing them a few hundred million dollars to get their act together and stop defrauding consumers. As long as people buy the defective products Asus has been shipping there is no incentive for Asus to sell properly functioning products. Asus has been on a downhill spiral since they launched the defective SLI series and every model mobo since seems to have major issues including vcore, memory, BIOS, etc. this is simply unacceptable for ANY mobo, let alone mobos being sold at a premium price and being marketed as "designed for serious overclockers" - which is blatant fraud IMNHO.
Until foolish sheep stop buying these defective mobos Asus won't provide a properly functioning Mobo.
phusg - Monday, April 24, 2006 - link
What SLI mobo manufacturer do you recommend then? I agree motherboards shouldn't be brought onto the market when they are nowhere near mature, but I doubt ASUS is alone in this...classy - Thursday, April 20, 2006 - link
When I see the results from overclocking it really makes one wonder why AMD is moving to ddr2 at this time. It is clear that there is still much life and very healthy life at that in ddr if amd went with a higher fsb.Gambit2K - Thursday, April 20, 2006 - link
They never answeared the question if the new bios fixed the problems people are having with soundblaster cards, the boot, the hickup issues most people are having. I recently flashed the 0404 bios and the hickup and the cold boot issues remains.Oh and I can't overclock my Samsung TCCD 10 mhz over stock, tried just about every bios setting there is. On my DFI Ultra-D my ram did 275-280 mhz without me even tweaking any of the settings.
When I buy a board I expect my computer to be able to restart and post 100% of the times, not 50-75% of the times too. I'll give ASUS until Conroe arrives to fix all of the issues or im selling the board and going on the intel train.
Gary Key - Thursday, April 20, 2006 - link
The SB X-FI needs to uninstalled when utilizing the Asus update program for bios changes, there is still a driver issue between the two items. I have a new set of X-FI beta drivers I will try shortly.
The only boot issue that remains in our testing is a limitation of the chipset when changing the HT multipliers. The board still requires a power down but this occurs on other ATI chipset boards. The warm reboot issue and power up issue with an overclocked setting was solved (at least for us and many others) with the 0311 bios.
We have no longer have the pauses in games with either the dual-core or single-core CPUs since the 0311 bios.
Actually, Samsung TCCD memory was our memory of choice on this board for overclocking. Email us and we will see if we can assist you.
ElFenix - Thursday, April 20, 2006 - link
pauses in games?i get pauses in movies and games with my A8R-MVP, i wonder if the fix that they applied here works and has been applied to the first A8R?
InuYasha - Thursday, April 20, 2006 - link
pow! right in the kisserFireTech - Thursday, April 20, 2006 - link
Can't wait for the DFI & ABIT test results....goinginstyle - Friday, April 21, 2006 - link
Hopefully the DFI/Abit reviews will show this kind of detail in overclocking and system settings. Really enjoyed the article and it is about time someone showed the effects overclocking the system has on gaming. Where are the min/max numbers? Your articles usually have those in the gaming scores.Marlowe - Thursday, April 20, 2006 - link
I've got the Sapphire A9RD580 PURE Crossfire here.. looks great, but very complicated to overclock.. I might just be very noobish though.. since it's my first AMD64 system.Board suffers from not having any supported voltage/temp monitoring programs tho.