Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe WiFi-AP

Verdict: Asus launches the best Spider motherboard yet.

Enthusiasts are hard to please. It's usually the fastest hardware that's regarded as the best. Promises of speed are therefore the focus of AMD's sales efforts for its new Spider gaming platform, which combines an AMD Phenom CPU, AMD 7-series chipset and ATI CrossFireX on the same motherboard. However, its launch last month was disappointing.

The M3A32-MVP Deluxe WiFi-AP is Asus' attempt at a top-end Spider board, based around AMD's 790FX chipset and stacked with premium features. There's on-board 802.11b/g wireless networking and Intel HD Audio with 8-channel surround sound. Analogue audio outputs are joined by optical and coaxial S/PDIF ports. There's also one eSATA, one FireWire and six USB 2 ports.

The Asus is a Socket AM2+ board, so if you want to use a quad-core CPU, your options are limited at the moment. There are only two AMD Phenoms available at the time of writing - the 2.2GHz 9500 model and the 2.3GHz 9600. Socket AM2+ is backwards compatible with AMD's older Socket AM2 CPU though.

As it features the 790FX chipset, the Asus can support up to four Radeon HD 3-series graphics cards in a CrossfireX configuration, so there are four full-length PCI-E slots. However, even with four single-slot cards in place, the CMOS battery is still easily accessible, as are the six S-ATA ports, thanks to them being orientated parallel to the surface of the PCB. If you want to use four graphics cards, at least two will need single-slot coolers, or you can use three graphics cards with dual-slot coolers, although this will block both PCI slots. If you stick with single-slot coolers, no matter how many graphics cards you stuff into the board, both PCI slots will remain clear for use.

In addition to its chunky copper chipset heatsinks, the Asus has an optional heatsink designed to cool your RAM. Four thin sheets of copper plating clamp onto a pair of DIMMs, either over their existing heatspreaders or to the bare memory chips, and conduct heat to the Northbridge heatsink via two copper heatpipes. We were eager to see if Asus had managed to make the 790FX chipset race along on all eight legs. Our previous overclocking endeavours with Phenom were scuppered by the early BIOSes of last month's Spider boards from MSI and Gigabyte, which didn't offer CPU voltage tweaking options. Previously, we couldn't persuade CrossFire to work with more than two graphics cards.

In the GIMP photo-editing test, at stock speeds, the Asus was slightly quicker than last month's MSI K9A2 CF and Gigabyte GA-MA790FX-DQ6 boards. The MSI scored 702 and the Gigabyte scored 712 in this test, compared to 736 for the Asus with the same CPU, memory and hard disk. The Asus was also quicker than the Gigabyte in the Handbrake H.264 video encoding test, although its score of 1,116 didn't top the MSI's 1,132. However, the Asus fluffed its lines in our multitasking test, with a score 127 points lower than the Gigabyte, and 194 behind the MSI.

The Asus' BIOS does, however, offer a full arsenal of tweakable voltage options to keep overclockers happy, and provide an insight into Phenom's capabilities. Before trying to overclock the CPU, we first ascertained the board's maximum HTT speed by dropping the CPU's multiplier. The highest HTT speed we could reach was 235MHz - only 15MHz faster than last month's Gigabyte.

However, this allowed us to overclock our test Phenom 9600 higher than on previous occasions, pushing the CPU from 2.3GHz to 2.7GHz. To keep the CPU stable at this level, we had to raise the CPU voltage to 1.45V. This isn't a bad overclock, and as we reached the limits of the motherboard before knowing for sure whether we'd reached the limits of the CPU, we wouldn't be surprised if our Phenom 9600 could be pushed further. ATI hasn't released any new drivers since last month, so CrossFireX is still broken.

Conclusion

The Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe WiFi-AP has an excellent layout and good features, but the Spider platform still has issues - most notably regarding CrossFireX. It also doesn't compare well with Intel's offerings in terms of the price-to-performance ratio. However, if you have a Socket AM2 CPU and want to keep it, but upgrade your PC, then this is the best Phenom-capable board we've seen so far.