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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gersson - Thursday, April 20, 2006 - link
The xpress 3200 definitely is very custimizeable. I had a hard time figuring out how to OC, too. Finally got a 800 mhz OC out of my Opteron 170, though :-)I'd get the DFI mobo that's just out instead. I need to sell my A8R32 quick!
Marlowe - Saturday, April 22, 2006 - link
I agree with you. I think I will be returning this Sapphire card.. Might be faboulus, but it suffers from extreme cold boot issues - I've used 30+ minutes every morning the past days to get the machine on. Also it's generally very hard to get around oc'ing.. The bios needs manually resetting all the time.. Needs steps of 20-30 in HTT to getting somewhere.. And a bunch of other stuff.. My general experience with the board can be summarized lik one consecutive week of troubleshooting. Not really what I excpected. Would any of you like this from your new very expensive motherboard?My choice is returning, or waiting 3-4 months on a good bios.. what would you do :P (PS, sorry for bad English)
Samus - Thursday, April 20, 2006 - link
Looks like an A8N-SLI all over again. You know, it only took a year or so in bioses (all the way up to 1013 or so before I had decent stability) before the board was desirable imho.I'll never buy another Asus board after that little fiasco.