ATI's RD580: ASUS A8R32-MVP Deluxe

Rounding things up...

This is probably one of the best early BIOS motherboards that we've ever had in our labs - we were able to get the board up and running - and more importantly performing well - without any effort whatsoever. However, there are some minor stability issues that need to be addressed if it's going to live up to ASUS' reputation for building motherboards that are pretty much bullet proof.

When we reviewed the ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe, one of the major positives about the motherboard was its stability. We gave the board a battering with our usual stress test consisting of Prime 95, 3DMark05 and IOMeter - it didn't blink in the slightest, running for well over 24 hours non-stop. The A8R32-MVP Deluxe was a little disappointing in that respect, because the 3D portion of our stress test dropped back to the desktop after roughly 17 hours on three different occasions and two different motherboards.

Having said that, we're confident that ASUS will iron out this minor stability niggle over the next couple of months with improved BIOS revisions. We say it's a minor niggle because the board was stable in everything we threw at it over the rest of our testing period, which amounted to something close to 100 hours if you include our stability and torture testing. We've found that poorly engineered motherboards point themselves out inside the first hour of stress testing - the A8R32-MVP is a well-engineered motherboard that is possibly suffering from a little BIOS immaturity at this early stage.

The overclockability of this board, and more specifically the HyperTransport bus was pretty incredible - we've never been able to run the HyperTransport bus quite this far outside of specification before now. The most impressive part of that was the fact that we didn't have to increase the voltages on any part of the chipset. We put this down to the way that ATI's ASIC team massively overspecced the RD580 North Bridge, meaning that pretty respectable overclocks are almost given to you without a great deal of effort. We certainly didn't have to do anything special to the motherboard to get it running at 276x11.0 with a 1380MHz HTT bus speed.

Layout wise, things are pretty good too and there is very little wrong with the board in that respect. Probably the only layout issues is the location of the Silicon Image 3132 SATA controller, as it's over next to the back I/O panel. It's obivously there because there is an external SATA port on the I/O panel, meaning that it'd be pretty hard to make the traces long enough to place any internal SATA ports on the same controller in a more convenient place. We think that a better solution would have been for ASUS to use a PCI bracket for external SATA connectivity and have the Sil 3132 controller close to the ULi South Bridge.

Value:

There are a few basic questions to ask when considering this motherboard, based on your needs.

Number one: do you want CrossFire rather than SLI? If so, you'll need to get this board. It is undoubtedly the fastest CrossFire board out there, and comes with the awesome ASUS stability and featureset. We know that X1900 CrossFire is the fastest graphics platform out there, so this is the best choice if you want to build the fastest machine out there right now.

Number two: if you want to just use single card graphics, are you better off with the NForce 4 chipset or the RD580 chipset? Our tests show that there is very little performance difference between the two chipsets, on ASUS boards, at stock settings. Your choice will come down to featureset: do you want onboard FireWall and the like, or do you want the High Definition Audio?

Number three: are you going to be overclocking? If the answer is yes, then all the other considerations go out the window. In our testing, we found the A8R32-MVP to be the best overclockers motherboard out there. It has unmatched options for tweaking memory and voltages, and is clearly specced up components that are good enough to run well out of specification. If you take into account the fact that you will be able to overclock this board far easier than anything else out there, then this is probably the fastest motherboard you can buy.

We mentioned in our BIOS section that we will be testing this further when we've got a couple more RD580 boards to look at, and we are expecting good things.

In terms of pricing, this board is expected to cost £116 when it hits online retailers. Compared to around £135 for the ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe, this looks damn good value for the same performance and more overclockability.

Final Thoughts...

The A8R32-MVP Deluxe fits into the same bracket as the ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard, in that it's pretty expensive and somewhat excessive. However, since when has a product that's excessive not been attractive to enthusiasts in some way or another? Many enthusiasts bought into SLI and many of you also bought the ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe too. The A8N32-SLI was a good overclocker in many respects, but ATI has worked towards making the HyperTransport bus incredibly overclockable in RD580 too.

ATI seems to be on something of a roll. Its X1900 series is current the fastest graphics platform out at the moment, and the RD580 chipset seems to finally be a mainboard chipset that gamers and enthusiasts can really get enthusiastic about. Coupled with ASUS' more-than-competent implementation of the chipset, and you get a motherboard that should be at the top of any list of potential motherboard buys.