Asus A8R-MVP: Mainstream Rocket

Final Words

Users were more disturbed than ATI may have thought with the limitations of the SB450 south bridge. In practical terms, it made no real difference at all in performance, since SATA2 is not really faster than SATA1 with current drives, and most USB transfers don't come even fractionally close to taxing the transfer capabilities of USB 2.0. However, for most users, competitive USB and SATA2 are options that don't need their performance to be explained - they are check list items that should perform exactly as users expect - not items with sub-par performance or missing from the check list.

The Asus A8R-MVP is the first motherboard that we have tested to use the ULi M1575 instead. The M1575 does provide competitive USB 2.0 performance and the SATA2 ports that are missing on the ATI SB450. We will also see the ULi M1575 on the MSI and Abit ATI chipset motherboards, as well as others coming down the pike. The performance of the ULi M1575 proves that Asus and others made a good choice in this south bridge.

The most important thing that the Asus A8R-MVP brings us, however, is not the competitive USB and SATA2 capabilities - they are just icing on the cake. The A8R-MVP is a monster of an overclocker - a mainstream board that proves that you don't have to spend a fortune to get incredible flexibility in pushing your system performance to new levels. This is the kind of board that serious overclockers love - a value-priced board that can be coupled to a value-priced AMD Socket 939 Opteron, for example, to get beyond top-of-the-line performance.

UPDATE: After further testing on shipping retail boards, we have concluded that a 2T Command Rate is needed for Clock frequencies above 260-265. We did not realize that the board we initially tested was actually reset to 2T in our benchmark tests at 325. However, the Asus A8R-MVP at 2T is often as fast as other board at 1T since the memory timings on this board are very agressive. The good news is that 320+ was in reach at 2T using good TCCD memory on all of the shipping retail boards we tested, and the performance at 2T was very competetive with other boards at the same speed at 1T Command Rate.

Asus tells us the Engineer responsible for this board design is a young professional, well-regarded for his creativity and promising design skills. Perhaps this is the first of many such surprises from this young Engineer.

In the end, the Asus A8R-MVP is definitely not what we expected. It is not top-end, expensive, 8-phase, or designed for the top overclock that anyone will ever achieve. It is really much more than any of those expectations. The A8R-MVP is a reasonably-priced, full-featured board that is not really missing any important features. Instead of the limitations of SB450, it has the advantages of ULi M1575. And this value-priced board produced the highest overclocks that we have ever seen with our OCZ Rev.2 Platinum memory and our 4000+ CPU.

As we said, it's a good thing that we actually test motherboards instead of relying on first impressions. The Asus A8R-MVP is exactly what many of you are looking for, and it is probably the best thing that could happen to the ATI AMD chipsets. A reasonably priced board that has all the check marks, is very fast at stock, and can overclock like a banshee is always a good thing.