Asus A8R32-MVP Issue

We have been working very closely with Asus and ATi to resolve the issues that people have been reporting and that we have seen. The new BIOS (Version 0311) has corrected the issues reported.

We will be releasing a full evaluation of the A8R32-MVP Deluxe shortly.

With the release of the RD580 chipset and the appearance of the Asus A8R32-MVP Deluxe, the web has been filled with quite a bit of talk about this chipset and mainboard.

We here at Planetx64.com also have one of these boards in for review. However, we have yet to release our review due to an unresolved issue with this board. These issues were serious enough to merit publication of the problems before we release the final benchmark results of the unit. It is only fair that the consumers be made aware of this and that the manufacturer take steps to correct this serious problem.

Earlier this month, ATI hard launched their Radeon Xpress 3200 chipset aimed squarely at the enthusiast community. Massively overclockable without upping the voltage, dual 16 lane PCIe slots with Crossfire support and a high performance chipset solution looked to make a winning combination.

Asus, an ATI Launch Partner, graciously provided us with a production unit to review. Although the board is very quick during most normal testing, it seems to have certain issues that we have been unable to fix.

The following issues are as of yet unresolved:

• Running PCMark05 with memory in Slots 1 and 3 will yield no score only the message that you need to select a suite before you can receive a score. Moving the RAM to Slots 2 and 4 corrects this. This issue was observed in both Windows XP Professional and WIndows XP x64 Edition.
• In the follwoing games the system would “stutter” after 10 minutes of play. The games would freeze for 5 seconds this would repeat every 5 or so seconds until the system was completely shut down. This stutter would even be evident in HDD tests run after the stutter began to occur:HalfLife2
  Call Of Duty2
  Battle Field 2
  the follwing a screen shots of the Taskmanager CPU performance meter graph and HDTach, this is what the system is doing during the stuttering. as you can see this issue effects the entire system.
  This issue was also observed in both Windows XP Professional and Windows XP x64 Edition

We have used the follwing methods to attempt to resolve this issue:

• All non used devices were shut down in the BIOS
• Different memory timings also yielded no fix.
• There are many posts appearing complaining of the same issue.
• We are working with both Asus and ATi to resolve this and will follow up with any and all information we receive about this.

My hope is that Asus and ATi will be able to fix this issue very soon. For the time being we all have to wait for them to provide us with a solution before we can properly review this board.

*Update* it appears that Asus is working on a BIOS to correct these issues. Driverheaven.net reports that a new BIOS was sent to them today, (v0033 dated 03-07-06) and so far has fixed a few of the isuses. We have not been provided this BIOS yet so we cannot confirm if this corrects the issues we have seen. We will keep you informed on any progress.

*Update 03-08-06* The new BIOS fixed the issues that I was seeing on this Board, Asus has stated that a final BIOS will be released soon. this BIOS will correct the clock timing issue with the A8R32-MVP. we will retest the board and release our review shortly.