General Performance
There is little in the performance of the Asus A8R32-MVP in Winstone
benchmarks that stands out. The Asus board is competitive with the best
Socket 939 Athlon 64 boards that we have tested. We have already
established in past motherboard reviews that the ATI chipset competes
well with other AMD chipsets.
With the Memory Controller on the Athlon 64 processor, Winstone
benchmarks are no longer very revealing of motherboard performance. In
fact, we see boards that are tweaked for best gaming performance are
often near the bottom of a tight range of benchmark performance
numbers. The Winstone tests themselves are rapidly becoming dated, and
are no longer supported by ZD Labs or Veritest. While Winstones are
still useful in providing real world performance data, we will be
dropping them from our motherboard test suite soon.
PCMark 2005 results with the A8R32-MVP Deluxe were outstanding, on the
other hand. Performance of the Asus RD580 topped the PCMark05 results,
and the dual x16 boards, ATI and NVIDIA, held the top two spots in the
05 results.
We were never completely comfortable with PCMark04, but PCMark05 is
proving to be a much more useful overall performance benchmark. It is
generally more sensitive than the older Winstones and PCM04 to recent
improvements in PC architecture. PCMark05 results, in general, relate
well to the other performance results that we find in our board tests -
providing a quick and reliable snapshot of board performance compared
to other motherboards.

February 17, 2006
February 16, 2006
February 15, 2006