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  • SLI - Monday, July 10, 2006 - link

    New BIOS v502. Available here:

    ftp://ftp.asus.com.tw/pub/ASUS/mb/so...-MVP%20DELU...">ftp://ftp.asus.com.tw/pub/ASUS/mb/so...-MVP%20DELU...
  • abakshi - Thursday, April 20, 2006 - link

    Anything new for the A8R-MVP?

    I'm having some performance issues with my system (A64-X2 4400+, A8R-MVP, 2 GB OCZ EL Platinum DDR400, 250GB WD 7200/16/SATA2, ATI X1800XT 512, Enermax 450W, Win XP SP2).

    Specifically, it multitasks very poorly in Windows -- e.g. whenever I insert a CD in the drive, the system basically freezes until the autoplay is done reading. Despite the dual-core A64 setup, it's actually worse at multitasking than my older P4 2.8C / 865PE (P4P800-D) machine. I've tried formatting and reinstalling Win XP, swapping out RAM sticks, different HDDs, etc.

    Games are generally fine, but I do have some stuttering issues, and benches are lower than they should be. I set the RAM timings manually to spec at stock clock (no OC until this is fixed) and made sure everything else was set up right -- no effect.

    The board's been disappointing, and I've seen a lot of other people have issues with it. I've had so many solid Asus Intel-based boards (P4P800-D, P4C800-D, P4T533-C, etc.), and I saw AT and others' reviews of this, so I figured it would be a halfway decent board. It's only faster than my old P4 system in games -- and that too, probably from the video card boost more than anything (X1800XT vs 9800 Pro).
  • Gary Key - Friday, April 21, 2006 - link

    quote:

    Anything new for the A8R-MVP?


    We have discovered stuttering issues in games and internet applets when utilizing the ADI on-board audio along with the latest version of JAVA 1.5 being loaded on the system. It has been tracked down to the ADI audio driver. Asus is working with ADI on a fix.

    Are you using the AMD X2 driver or Microsoft Dual-Core patch? If not, you will get stuttering and lower than normal performance in certain games and applications.

    Please email us and we can work on your issues with you directly.
  • goinginstyle - Thursday, May 4, 2006 - link

    Any updates?
  • XrayDoc - Thursday, April 20, 2006 - link

    Are you sure your tested revision number was 1.3G? I just bought the same board from Newegg. It is a revision 1.03G.
  • Gary Key - Thursday, April 20, 2006 - link

    Sorry about that, 1.03G, article corrected. :)
  • mino - Thursday, April 20, 2006 - link

    AFAIK K8 memory controler operates in synchronous mode all the time - there is no such a thing as an asynchronous mode in this architecture.

    What you referred to was ratio between clock generator frequency and memory frequency. However memory freq. depends only on the CPU freq. and memory divider employed, clockgen(also called FSB in BIOS-es) freq is irrelevant here as far as memory performance is concerned.

    I hope you consider this in the future when you refer to various memory speed ratios tested.
  • Gary Key - Thursday, April 20, 2006 - link

    quote:

    AFAIK K8 memory controler operates in synchronous mode all the time - there is no such a thing as an asynchronous mode in this architecture.


    I appreciate the comments. We fully understand the technicalities of the K8 memory architecture and would have utilized the "correct" terminology. In doing so our sentence structures would have turned into small paragraphs. ;-) We knew our terminology would be an issue with certain readers. However, we decided to go with synchronous or 1:1 as the majority of people are extremely familiar with this terminology when discussing memory settings, right or wrong. I will see about adding an additional statement clarifying the architecture design and setup.
  • FireTech - Thursday, April 20, 2006 - link

    Gary, I know you're busy but what's the rough timeframe for the All Crossfire MB Round-up appearing?
  • Gary Key - Thursday, April 20, 2006 - link

    Hi,

    The lab is backed up right now. ;-) The DFI article will be out next week, Abit following in about a week we hope (board delay). If you want Intel CrossFire we also have the little Yonah that could article coming up shortly.

    Thanks....
  • cornfedone - Thursday, April 20, 2006 - link

    It's been known by experienced PC builders for several years that Asus has been shipping mobos with a laundry lists of defects. This has been documented by any number of hardware review sites and hundreds of thousands of consumers. In addition Asus has been completely arrogant about these defective products, failing to properly fix or replace them and completely ignoring their customers after they were duped in to purchasing these defective products via misleading advertising and bogus reviews of hand-picked mobos.

    Asus needs a good class action lawsuit costing them a few hundred million dollars to get their act together and stop defrauding consumers. As long as people buy the defective products Asus has been shipping there is no incentive for Asus to sell properly functioning products. Asus has been on a downhill spiral since they launched the defective SLI series and every model mobo since seems to have major issues including vcore, memory, BIOS, etc. this is simply unacceptable for ANY mobo, let alone mobos being sold at a premium price and being marketed as "designed for serious overclockers" - which is blatant fraud IMNHO.

    Until foolish sheep stop buying these defective mobos Asus won't provide a properly functioning Mobo.
  • phusg - Monday, April 24, 2006 - link

    What SLI mobo manufacturer do you recommend then? I agree motherboards shouldn't be brought onto the market when they are nowhere near mature, but I doubt ASUS is alone in this...
  • classy - Thursday, April 20, 2006 - link

    When I see the results from overclocking it really makes one wonder why AMD is moving to ddr2 at this time. It is clear that there is still much life and very healthy life at that in ddr if amd went with a higher fsb.
  • Gambit2K - Thursday, April 20, 2006 - link

    They never answeared the question if the new bios fixed the problems people are having with soundblaster cards, the boot, the hickup issues most people are having. I recently flashed the 0404 bios and the hickup and the cold boot issues remains.

    Oh and I can't overclock my Samsung TCCD 10 mhz over stock, tried just about every bios setting there is. On my DFI Ultra-D my ram did 275-280 mhz without me even tweaking any of the settings.

    When I buy a board I expect my computer to be able to restart and post 100% of the times, not 50-75% of the times too. I'll give ASUS until Conroe arrives to fix all of the issues or im selling the board and going on the intel train.
  • Gary Key - Thursday, April 20, 2006 - link

    quote:

    They never answeared the question if the new bios fixed the problems people are having with soundblaster cards, the boot, the hickup issues most people are having. I recently flashed the 0404 bios and the hickup and the cold boot issues remains.


    The SB X-FI needs to uninstalled when utilizing the Asus update program for bios changes, there is still a driver issue between the two items. I have a new set of X-FI beta drivers I will try shortly.

    The only boot issue that remains in our testing is a limitation of the chipset when changing the HT multipliers. The board still requires a power down but this occurs on other ATI chipset boards. The warm reboot issue and power up issue with an overclocked setting was solved (at least for us and many others) with the 0311 bios.

    We have no longer have the pauses in games with either the dual-core or single-core CPUs since the 0311 bios.

    quote:

    Oh and I can't overclock my Samsung TCCD 10 mhz over stock, tried just about every bios setting there is. On my DFI Ultra-D my ram did 275-280 mhz without me even tweaking any of the settings.


    Actually, Samsung TCCD memory was our memory of choice on this board for overclocking. Email us and we will see if we can assist you.
  • ElFenix - Thursday, April 20, 2006 - link

    pauses in games?

    i get pauses in movies and games with my A8R-MVP, i wonder if the fix that they applied here works and has been applied to the first A8R?
  • InuYasha - Thursday, April 20, 2006 - link

    pow! right in the kisser
  • FireTech - Thursday, April 20, 2006 - link

    Can't wait for the DFI & ABIT test results....
  • goinginstyle - Friday, April 21, 2006 - link

    Hopefully the DFI/Abit reviews will show this kind of detail in overclocking and system settings. Really enjoyed the article and it is about time someone showed the effects overclocking the system has on gaming. Where are the min/max numbers? Your articles usually have those in the gaming scores.
  • Marlowe - Thursday, April 20, 2006 - link

    I've got the Sapphire A9RD580 PURE Crossfire here.. looks great, but very complicated to overclock.. I might just be very noobish though.. since it's my first AMD64 system.

    Board suffers from not having any supported voltage/temp monitoring programs tho.
  • 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.

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