CPU/Mobo Asus RD580 is A8R32-MVP Deluxe
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I think all you guys out here interested in this mobo shud restrain yourselves from the temptation as AM2 is just around the corner...treat yourselves to a new cpu and a brand new mobo then..and as a bonus you'll even get an updated ATI SB600 Sbridge in place of ULI M1575 SB of the current mobo....
till then..peace...
till then..peace...
Overclocking:
We achieved our previous record for HyperTransport overclocking on an Athlon 64 mobo using the Asus A8R-MVP. That board reached 325MHz stable. Here's what I got from the A8R32-MVP.
Add another 5MHz to the record and crown a new overclocking king. The A8R32-MVP happily booted into Windows and ran games at this speed. I did have to dial back the HyperTransport multiplier to 3X and overvolt the north bridge mildly in order to reach 330MHz, but it didn't take lots of drama or tweak to get there.
The A8R32-MVP Deluxe was especially forgiving when I overshot, too, powering back up after a failed attempt and prompting me that an overclocking attempt had failed. I didn't have to clear the CMOS once in order to get it to POST.
Conclusions:
ATI's first enthusiast chipsets, the Radeon Xpress 200 and its CrossFire Edition, were slow getting started. Decent motherboards from major manufacturers like Asus didn't appear overnight when ATI launched the chipsets, and even as they trickled out over the ensuing weeks and months, the first wave of boards didn't always live up to their potential. With the A8R32-MVP Deluxe, the CrossFire Xpress 3200 shoots out of the gate onboard a world-class enthusiast motherboard. No, the new north bridge's additional PCI Express lanes aren't a performance breakthrough, just an incremental gain. But this is the speediest way to run a pair of Radeon X1900 XT/XTX cards in a CrossFire configuration, and that makes the A8R32-MVP Deluxe the outright fastest gaming platform going today. The Xpress 3200 north bridge demonstrates all of the best characteristics one could ask of a chip, too: it's small, runs fairly cool, doesn't consume much power or generate much heat, and it overclocks as willingly as an old Celeron 300Aâ€â€up to 50% past its stock speeds and beyond. Paired up with ULi'sâ€â€erm, make that NVIDIA'sâ€â€M1575 south bridge, the CrossFire Xpress 3200 makes for a full-featured chipset with few notable weaknesses.
Asus has taken this core logic combo and spun it successfully into a high-end motherboard that is every bit the equal of its own A8N32-SLI Deluxe. The layout is solid, if occasionally cramped like any high-end ATX mobo, and the BIOS exposes enough tweaking options to satisfy most enthusiasts. Quiet computing freaks will probably miss the kind of extensive fan speed control available on Abit's newer boards, and they might wish to have better control over overclocking with Cool'n'Quiet enabled like some DFI mobos provide. But the A8R32-MVP Deluxe more or less makes up for those shortcomings by simply consuming way less power than the A8N32-SLI Deluxeâ€â€and likely other nForce4 SLI X16-based motherboards.
Oddly enough, the A8R32-MVP Deluxe's toughest competitor may be its little brother, the Asus A8R-MVP. We reviewed that board not long ago, and if you can live with eight PCI Express lanes per graphics slot, it's probably a better value. The A8R32-MVP Deluxe begins life with a price tag around (or north of) $200, while the A8R-MVP is already selling online for about a hundred bucks. I'm not convinced that the A8R32-MVP Deluxe is worth twice the money, even though the newer board is somewhat faster for CrossFire and sports a full feature set. Then again, if you really plan to stuff over a thousand bucks worth of graphics cards into its PCI Express slots, perhaps the A8R32-MVP's price premium will look like a minor speed bump on the road to dual-GPU bliss.
I will gripe about one omission, though: the BIOS doesn't include enough control over maximum and minimum CPU multipliers when overclocking in concert with AMD's Cool'n'Quiet power management technology. The board does allow for multiplier adjustments when C'n'Q is enabled, but they don't seem to take effect; the system just POSTs with the CPU at its max multiplier instead.
Complete Review @ TechReport
We achieved our previous record for HyperTransport overclocking on an Athlon 64 mobo using the Asus A8R-MVP. That board reached 325MHz stable. Here's what I got from the A8R32-MVP.
Add another 5MHz to the record and crown a new overclocking king. The A8R32-MVP happily booted into Windows and ran games at this speed. I did have to dial back the HyperTransport multiplier to 3X and overvolt the north bridge mildly in order to reach 330MHz, but it didn't take lots of drama or tweak to get there.
The A8R32-MVP Deluxe was especially forgiving when I overshot, too, powering back up after a failed attempt and prompting me that an overclocking attempt had failed. I didn't have to clear the CMOS once in order to get it to POST.
Conclusions:
ATI's first enthusiast chipsets, the Radeon Xpress 200 and its CrossFire Edition, were slow getting started. Decent motherboards from major manufacturers like Asus didn't appear overnight when ATI launched the chipsets, and even as they trickled out over the ensuing weeks and months, the first wave of boards didn't always live up to their potential. With the A8R32-MVP Deluxe, the CrossFire Xpress 3200 shoots out of the gate onboard a world-class enthusiast motherboard. No, the new north bridge's additional PCI Express lanes aren't a performance breakthrough, just an incremental gain. But this is the speediest way to run a pair of Radeon X1900 XT/XTX cards in a CrossFire configuration, and that makes the A8R32-MVP Deluxe the outright fastest gaming platform going today. The Xpress 3200 north bridge demonstrates all of the best characteristics one could ask of a chip, too: it's small, runs fairly cool, doesn't consume much power or generate much heat, and it overclocks as willingly as an old Celeron 300Aâ€â€up to 50% past its stock speeds and beyond. Paired up with ULi'sâ€â€erm, make that NVIDIA'sâ€â€M1575 south bridge, the CrossFire Xpress 3200 makes for a full-featured chipset with few notable weaknesses.
Asus has taken this core logic combo and spun it successfully into a high-end motherboard that is every bit the equal of its own A8N32-SLI Deluxe. The layout is solid, if occasionally cramped like any high-end ATX mobo, and the BIOS exposes enough tweaking options to satisfy most enthusiasts. Quiet computing freaks will probably miss the kind of extensive fan speed control available on Abit's newer boards, and they might wish to have better control over overclocking with Cool'n'Quiet enabled like some DFI mobos provide. But the A8R32-MVP Deluxe more or less makes up for those shortcomings by simply consuming way less power than the A8N32-SLI Deluxeâ€â€and likely other nForce4 SLI X16-based motherboards.
Oddly enough, the A8R32-MVP Deluxe's toughest competitor may be its little brother, the Asus A8R-MVP. We reviewed that board not long ago, and if you can live with eight PCI Express lanes per graphics slot, it's probably a better value. The A8R32-MVP Deluxe begins life with a price tag around (or north of) $200, while the A8R-MVP is already selling online for about a hundred bucks. I'm not convinced that the A8R32-MVP Deluxe is worth twice the money, even though the newer board is somewhat faster for CrossFire and sports a full feature set. Then again, if you really plan to stuff over a thousand bucks worth of graphics cards into its PCI Express slots, perhaps the A8R32-MVP's price premium will look like a minor speed bump on the road to dual-GPU bliss.
I will gripe about one omission, though: the BIOS doesn't include enough control over maximum and minimum CPU multipliers when overclocking in concert with AMD's Cool'n'Quiet power management technology. The board does allow for multiplier adjustments when C'n'Q is enabled, but they don't seem to take effect; the system just POSTs with the CPU at its max multiplier instead.
Complete Review @ TechReport
Shripad
Innovator
CaaYoTee said:I think all you guys out here interested in this mobo shud restrain yourselves from the temptation as AM2 is just around the corner...treat yourselves to a new cpu and a brand new mobo then..and as a bonus you'll even get an updated ATI SB600 Sbridge in place of ULI M1575 SB of the current mobo....
till then..peace...
Never jump on new socket bandwagon too early.
Early revision boards are almost always buggy. it takes few months and couple of revisions by board makers to iorn out the bugs and then the platform starts to show its true colours.
I wont think off AM2 before december this year.
Remember what happened to S939 and horrifying experiences of early adoptors which included me.
Made mistake once, not making it again.
Funky said:
Quite true..moreover i'm not too optimistic about the ATi SB600..the ULi M1575 south bridge seems good enough even for AM2...remember Ati's SB450?? It was plain crap...:no:
but again going for a new mobo in the wake of a revision which should be out in a few months means that you may not get a good resale value for your old stuff when you wud want to go for the newer socket and a compatible mobo..plus the A8R32 seems way too expensive at the moment..i dont think the revisions are worth a $100 price hike...:no: so it wud be better to hold your horses just for the time being..
Those of you who have visited the site in the last week will have noticed that our coverage of ATI’s Crossfire 3200 has been non-existant. We have been quiet on the reasons behind this because we were working through them with ATI/Asus and our A8R32-MVP.
Here is an extract from our as yet unpublished review:
“Once we were up and running within windows we ran the system in general use for a few days and all seemed well. Next up was our plan to perform performance testing on the board, this is when we started to experience some concerns.
The first issue we found was that the Sisoft Sandra results for the system were pretty random. On one run we would score in around the expected performance and then a repeat run would show results 10x more than expected. Run it again and we were just as likely to receive a result of about 1000points less than expected. Thinking this was most likely a random issue with Sandra we moved on to PCmark05, however this resulted in more issues being highlighted. For example, hard drive performance on our SATA drive was reporting almost zero. And on occasion some tests would hang or loop.
So we now had several applications giving us unexpected results. In an attempt to fix this we performed numerous installs, new CPU’s, memory, psu, gfx, heatsink/fans, drives, drivers, patches and an initial updated BIOS (0307). You name it and we more than likely swapped it out. All the while our voltages and temps were reporting fine through bios and Asus probe.
So having given up we contacted ATI (and they contacted Asus) looking for any assistance…
…a few days later we received a note from ATI with a new Bios attached. The note accompanying the bios stated that a timing issue had been found and that this was resolved by the new bios. This happened early on the 4th March which by this time was well after NDA expiry so most other reviews you have seen of this board use the BIOS which has timing issues.
Following the bios update we were pleased to see that the Sisoft Sandra results were fixed, we also noted that our own (real world) Driver heaven Photoshop benchmark was reporting much more stable results. So we retested in Pcmark05. Disappointingly there was still an issue with some of the tests and so we reported back to ATI at the same time we reported a minor bios issue involving the onboard LAN config.
ATI responded letting us know that a clock issue was still being worked on by Asus, so again we waited on a fix before proceeding.â€
That brings us up to this evening when some of our readers contacted us saying that they and a few others were experiencing random performance issues in real world programs (such as Quake 4 and Battlefield 2) when using their A8R32-MVP. Having read through those issues it was clear that they too had attempted many of the same fixes as us and as they did not have access to the timing fix bios (v 0309) they were left with an unusable board and worse, a waste of money.
We have chosen to publish the above information to ensure that anyone wishing to purchase the A8R32-MVP is aware of the issues that end users are currently experiencing as no online review has yet made people aware of the performance issues with this particular board. We also want to make existing users aware that they cannot fix the issues themselves.
We await the fix from ATI/Asus and will report back on its success as soon as we have tested it. Hopefully now that real users are affected Asus will give the fix a higher priority.
Here is an extract from our as yet unpublished review:
“Once we were up and running within windows we ran the system in general use for a few days and all seemed well. Next up was our plan to perform performance testing on the board, this is when we started to experience some concerns.
The first issue we found was that the Sisoft Sandra results for the system were pretty random. On one run we would score in around the expected performance and then a repeat run would show results 10x more than expected. Run it again and we were just as likely to receive a result of about 1000points less than expected. Thinking this was most likely a random issue with Sandra we moved on to PCmark05, however this resulted in more issues being highlighted. For example, hard drive performance on our SATA drive was reporting almost zero. And on occasion some tests would hang or loop.
So we now had several applications giving us unexpected results. In an attempt to fix this we performed numerous installs, new CPU’s, memory, psu, gfx, heatsink/fans, drives, drivers, patches and an initial updated BIOS (0307). You name it and we more than likely swapped it out. All the while our voltages and temps were reporting fine through bios and Asus probe.
So having given up we contacted ATI (and they contacted Asus) looking for any assistance…
…a few days later we received a note from ATI with a new Bios attached. The note accompanying the bios stated that a timing issue had been found and that this was resolved by the new bios. This happened early on the 4th March which by this time was well after NDA expiry so most other reviews you have seen of this board use the BIOS which has timing issues.
Following the bios update we were pleased to see that the Sisoft Sandra results were fixed, we also noted that our own (real world) Driver heaven Photoshop benchmark was reporting much more stable results. So we retested in Pcmark05. Disappointingly there was still an issue with some of the tests and so we reported back to ATI at the same time we reported a minor bios issue involving the onboard LAN config.
ATI responded letting us know that a clock issue was still being worked on by Asus, so again we waited on a fix before proceeding.â€
That brings us up to this evening when some of our readers contacted us saying that they and a few others were experiencing random performance issues in real world programs (such as Quake 4 and Battlefield 2) when using their A8R32-MVP. Having read through those issues it was clear that they too had attempted many of the same fixes as us and as they did not have access to the timing fix bios (v 0309) they were left with an unusable board and worse, a waste of money.
We have chosen to publish the above information to ensure that anyone wishing to purchase the A8R32-MVP is aware of the issues that end users are currently experiencing as no online review has yet made people aware of the performance issues with this particular board. We also want to make existing users aware that they cannot fix the issues themselves.
We await the fix from ATI/Asus and will report back on its success as soon as we have tested it. Hopefully now that real users are affected Asus will give the fix a higher priority.
Yeah.... and what a mess by all the motherboard makers overall. DFI aint get there shit right even with Venus. Asus pulls out a decent board but then runs around to figure out the major problems while running the benchmarks Hope the magic beta BIOS is Finalled with no more fuss.
Hope the magic beta BIOS is Finalled with no more fuss.- Status