ATI's RD580: ASUS A8R32-MVP Deluxe

Testing Methods:

With the exception of SiSoft Sandra's unbuffered memory bandwidth benchmark - which, incidentally, measures real memory bandwidth when you need it most - all of our benchmarks have been engineered to give you numbers that you are likely to find useful when actually using the products we have evaluated in the real world. There are plans to increase the number of benchmarks over time and we're running additional tests that will not be published until we have enough products to make a reasonable comparison.

We are also focusing a lot more of our time on evaluating the stability of the motherboards (and platforms) using a stress test designed to highlight any of the potential weaknesses that the product may have. That involves a gradually increasing amount of stress starting with Prime95 and expanding to IOMeter and 3DMark03 if all is well. This is to ensure that all parts of the system are stressed simultaneously over a period of time.

We believe that the consumer is never likely to subject their platform to this level of stress and we are not expecting every product to complete an entire extended stress test. However, most poorly engineered products fail within the first couple of hours, or even minutes, allowing us to make a conscious decision on whether a motherboard (or platform) is worth your money, regardless of how well it performs in our benchmarks.

Test Setup:

AMD Athlon 64 FX-57 (operating at 2800MHz - 14x200); ASUS A8R32-MVP Deluxe (CrossFire Xpress 3200); 2 x 512MB Corsair 3200XL Pro (operating in dual channel with 2.0-2-2-7-1T timings); 1 x ATI Radeon X1900 CrossFire Edition; 1 x ATI Radeon X1900XTX (operating in CrossFire at 625/1450MHz); Seagate 7200.9 250GB 7,200RPM SATA II hard disk drive; OCZ PowerStream 520W power supply unit; Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2; DirectX 9.0c; Catalyst 6.2 WHQL.

AMD Athlon 64 FX-57 (operating at 2800MHz - 14x200); ASUS A8R32-MVP Deluxe (CrossFire Xpress 3200); 2 x 512MB Corsair 3200XL Pro (operating in dual channel with 2.0-2-2-7-1T timings); 1 x BFGTech GeForce 7800 GT OC (operating at 425/1050MHz); Seagate 7200.9 250GB 7,200RPM SATA II hard disk drive; OCZ PowerStream 520W power supply unit; Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2; DirectX 9.0c; NVIDIA Forceware 82.12.

AMD Athlon 64 FX-57 (operating at 2800MHz - 14x200); ASUS A8R-MVP Deluxe (CrossFire Xpress 200); 2 x 512MB Corsair 3200XL Pro (operating in dual channel with 2.0-2-2-7-1T timings); 1 x ATI Radeon X1900 CrossFire Edition; 1 x ATI Radeon X1900XTX (operating in CrossFire at 625/1450MHz); Seagate 7200.9 250GB 7,200RPM SATA II hard disk drive; OCZ PowerStream 600W power supply unit; Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2; DirectX 9.0c; Catalyst 6.2 WHQL.

AMD Athlon 64 FX-57 (operating at 2800MHz - 14x200); ASUS A8R-MVP (CrossFire Xpress 200); 2 x 512MB Corsair 3200XL Pro (operating in dual channel with 2.0-2-2-7-1T timings); 1 x BFGTech GeForce 7800 GT OC (operating at 425/1050MHz); Seagate 7200.9 250GB 7,200RPM SATA II hard disk drive; OCZ PowerStream 600W power supply unit; Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2; DirectX 9.0c; NVIDIA Forceware 82.12.

AMD Athlon 64 FX-57 (operating at 2800MHz - 14x200); ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe (nForce4 SLI x16); 2 x 512MB Corsair 3200XL Pro (operating in dual channel with 2.0-2-2-7-1T timings); 2 x BFGTech GeForce 7800 GT OC (operating at 425/1050MHz); Seagate 7200.9 250GB 7,200RPM SATA II hard disk drive; OCZ PowerStream 600W power supply unit; Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2; DirectX 9.0c; NVIDIA Forceware 82.12.

AMD Athlon 64 FX-57 (operating at 2800MHz - 14x200); DFI LANParty nF4 SLI-DR (nForce4 SLI); 2 x 512MB Corsair 3200XL Pro (operating in dual channel with 2.0-2-2-7-1T timings); 2 x BFGTech GeForce 7800 GT OC (operating at 425/1050MHz); Seagate 7200.9 250GB 7,200RPM SATA II hard disk drive; OCZ PowerStream 600W power supply unit; Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2; DirectX 9.0c; NVIDIA Forceware 82.12.

Note: We had to use a power supply unit with a single 12v rail on the ASUS A8R32-MVP Deluxe motherboard in order to get the board to run stabily - it seems that this particular board doesn't like dual 12v power lines coming from the PSU.

Memory Performance:

The A8R32-MVP and A8N32-SLI motherboards both outperform their dual PCI-Express x8 predecessors by a small margin in our memory efficiency test. The A8R32-MVP Deluxe gave the best memory efficiency we've seen on a motherboard thus far and there was a reasonable performance improvement from using two Radeon X1900's in CrossFire.