Generally we thought Asus' A8R-MVP is a great board, at least we did until we got two X1900 cards. Some of our readers were cursing that it's not the high end board and that it lacks some features but we think that it's a great board for a $100 market. To be honest, you don’t have much choice if you want a RD480 Crossfire motherboard. We still remember the traumas that we had with DFI Crossfire motherboard, a huge lump of all kind of problems. So far we've tried two X1800 cards and had no problems, we tried two X1600 cards and didn't had any problems, nor with two X1300 cards either. So Asus was our choice.
It all started with two X1900 cards, a master and slave one. Since we got those cards, we had all sorts of tests crashing around us. Most of our game tests and later even 3Dmarks were crashing all the time. We just could not make it stable. Of course we tried to change some pieces of hardware to see if there was some kind of compatibility problem. We changed dual core Athlon X2 4800+ CPU for a single core FX57 and it didn’t help. We changed OCZ memory for Corsair and played with the timings but it didn’t help either. We swapped two times 1 GB modules for two times 512 MB and it didn’t help. We changed OCZ 600 W PSU for Akasa 650 W and that made things better but still our rig was crashing and crishing in quite a few of the test.
We managed to get two Asus A8R-MVP motherboards as we thought that we have a faulty board but it didn’t help. It just continued to crush and crash with two X1900 cards but was perfectly stable with two X1600s for the whole time.
The only scenario where we almost got the machine stable was with a single memory module plugged inside. This will degrade your memory performance drastically but managed to get the system a little bit more stable.
We spoke with ATI's top shot motherboard engineer and he told us that it either had some power problems and as the memory acted strangely he said that it could be a BIOS prob as well. We hope he is right as we failed to test two X1900 Crossfire cards on this setup. Luckily for ATI, the RD580 works rocks stable with those two cards and we are talking first hand here.
We will let you know if we resolve the problems with two X1900 Crossfire card and Asus A8R-MVP board but if you want to buy two X1300 or two X1600 even the two X1800 this might be the right board for you, I just can not recommend it to anyone that wants X1900 cards inside. Give it a week or so and you may have something to be enthusiastic about.
It all started with two X1900 cards, a master and slave one. Since we got those cards, we had all sorts of tests crashing around us. Most of our game tests and later even 3Dmarks were crashing all the time. We just could not make it stable. Of course we tried to change some pieces of hardware to see if there was some kind of compatibility problem. We changed dual core Athlon X2 4800+ CPU for a single core FX57 and it didn’t help. We changed OCZ memory for Corsair and played with the timings but it didn’t help either. We swapped two times 1 GB modules for two times 512 MB and it didn’t help. We changed OCZ 600 W PSU for Akasa 650 W and that made things better but still our rig was crashing and crishing in quite a few of the test.
We managed to get two Asus A8R-MVP motherboards as we thought that we have a faulty board but it didn’t help. It just continued to crush and crash with two X1900 cards but was perfectly stable with two X1600s for the whole time.
The only scenario where we almost got the machine stable was with a single memory module plugged inside. This will degrade your memory performance drastically but managed to get the system a little bit more stable.
We spoke with ATI's top shot motherboard engineer and he told us that it either had some power problems and as the memory acted strangely he said that it could be a BIOS prob as well. We hope he is right as we failed to test two X1900 Crossfire cards on this setup. Luckily for ATI, the RD580 works rocks stable with those two cards and we are talking first hand here.
We will let you know if we resolve the problems with two X1900 Crossfire card and Asus A8R-MVP board but if you want to buy two X1300 or two X1600 even the two X1800 this might be the right board for you, I just can not recommend it to anyone that wants X1900 cards inside. Give it a week or so and you may have something to be enthusiastic about.