Final Words
The Asus A8R-MVP was a board that was brilliantly positioned by Asus
for success. It performed well, overclocked well, and was very cheap.
Selling into a market that had no compelling reason for choosing ATI
instead, the A8R-MVP had just the right combination of features to
attract a large number of buyers.
In some ways, however, the A8R-MVP made promises that it could not
keep. The wonderful and fast overclocking required users to adjust down
to a 2T Command Rate, which many enthusiasts did not like, despite the
fact the Asus was as fast at 2T as most other boards at 1T. There was
always the thought of how much faster it would be at 1T. The other
major issue was the very limited vCore overclock options, which many
made a bigger deal of than what facts or true performance justified.
Since the launch of the A8R-MVP, the AMD market has also changed. Now,
the ATI X1900XT is the fastest video card on the market. Instead of
last generation's X850XT Crossfire, ATI's recent X1900XT Crossfire is
now the fastest dual video solution that you can buy. The top end of
the Socket 939 market is also now moving to dual x16 PCIe and ATI is
finally introducing their RD580 dual x16 chipset. This is the chipset
that will likely put ATI firmly on the AMD roadmap. Asus appears to
understand these changes in the market, and the updated A8R32-MVP
Deluxe has been positioned upward.
In the process of updating the A8R-MVP to the A8R32-MVP Deluxe, Asus
has also listened to buyers of the A8R-MVP. With the move to the new
rock-solid ATI RD580, Asus has updated just about every complaint with
the original A8R-MVP. There are even finer adjustments for many BIOS
settings, voltage adjustment options have been greatly expanded from
simple on/off to expanded adjustment ranges, the AD1986 6-channel HD
codec was replaced by the even better 7.1 channel Realtek ALC882 HD
with 103dB S/N ratio, a second full-speed PCIe Gigabit LAN was added,
two more SATA2 ports were added with the excellent Silicon Image 3132,
and the list goes on. Asus enhanced the A8R32-MVP and moved it from
corporate pale brown to Deluxe black. Along the way, the range of BIOS
options expanded to one of the best ranges of overclocking controls
available on any Asus motherboard. The good things were also kept, like
the full SATA2 3Gb/sec ULi M1575 Southbridge instead of the outdated
ATI SB450, and the passive cooling without noisy fans on the chipset.
The big question then is: do all the changes improve performance? Based
on our tests here, the answer is a resounding "YES". Where the A8R-MVP
had to drop to 2T at around 260-265, the A8R32-MVP is stable at 1T
Command Rate to 322 in our tests - the highest 1T overclock that we
have measured with this processor/memory on air cooling. The board is
also solid and exceptionally cool-running, even when pressed hard. We
measured a Northbridge temperature of just 109F while looping 3DMarks
at over 300FSB; the Southbridge was a similarly cool 107F. This was
with passive cooling and the board under high-stress conditions. This
performance is really more a compliment to ATI's RD580 chipset than to
this Asus design.
The bottom line is that the updated A8R32-MVP is an easy board to love.
It will cost more than the A8R-MVP, but it also delivers more. The
A8R32-MVP Deluxe provides the best dual x16 video performance that you
can currently buy. A pair of X1900XT video cards in Crossfire mode is
the current best in video, and the Asus A8R32-MVP drives this video
package effortlessly when coupled with an appropriate high wattage
power supply. The feature set is competitive with any Socket 939
available and also includes on-board high-definition audio that is not
available on current NVIDIA Dual x16 SLI boards. The design is also
elegantly simple with an RD580 chipset designed from the ground up for
high-speed overclocking and for Dual x16 video.
None of this means that the A8R32-MVP Deluxe is perfect for all users.
There will be users who find that 3.2V vDIMM is not enough for their
discontinued VX or BH5 memory chips, others will complain that only
1.65V vCore for a 1.35V processor is just not enough to drive their
Opteron to 3.x GHz, and some will rightly find fault that there is no
usable PCIe slot left if you run Crossfire on this board. However, for
most end-users and most enthusiasts, the A8R32-MVP will do exactly what
they want to do with their AMD Athlon 64 processor. This even includes
some of the highest and most stable overclocks that we have seen on a
Socket 939 board.
We have yet to review the RD580 - that is coming in a couple of weeks -
and we will need to see more RD580 boards before we know if the
A8R32-MVP is that good or whether it is the RD580 chipset that is the
goodness here. We can confess that the A8R32-MVP Deluxe has become a
favorite board in the lab in a very short time and it is likely to stay
on our bench until the AM2 socket, or until that possible killer DFI
RD580 comes along. For now, this is a board worth searching out when
you can buy one in a couple of weeks. It looks as if Asus has a young
motherboard Engineer on a dynamic development team who is going to give
some legends in the industry a run for their money.
Thanks for listening, Asus.
