ASUS A8R32-MVP: Taking the Overclocking Route via the 0404
by Gary Key on April 20, 2006 3:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Performance Results
What good is an article without some actual performance numbers? If you dozed off during the last couple of pages, hopefully this information should be more enjoyable. While we are not providing numbers from the entire test suite there is enough information here to draw conclusions about what general settings work best in some of today's latest game engines.
In our tests it is clear a balanced setting between maximizing the CPU clock speed while maintaining a 1:1 memory ratio with the lowest latency possible will provide the best results. No surprises there but we really expected the 9x312HTT settings to perform better. This leads us to wonder if our issues with the 9X multiplier are creating lower than anticipated results. Our favorite and highly recommended setting with this CPU/Memory/Motherboard combination is the 12x256HTT setting as it performs within 1% of the 10x300HTT setting while allowing a larger variety of memory module options to be utilized. The system also requires lower memory and chipset voltages with the added benefit of better memory timings when using higher performance modules.
In essence, you are placing your system's performance capability primarily on the CPU's ability to overclock instead of the CPU and Memory overclocks when operating at the 10x300HTT setting. There is some additional overclocking headroom on this board at the 12x256HTT setting while we just barely eked by with the 10x300HTT setup. A 12x260HTT (or higher) setting should match or exceed the 10x300HTT setup in actual application and game benchmarks.
When comparing the top results generated by the 10x300HTT setting to the stock settings we see a CPU speed increase of 25%, memory clock speed of 50%, and Sandra memory benchmarks increasing by 34%. However, this does not directly translate into the same percentage improvements in the game benchmarks. We notice an increase of 23% in Q4, 12% in Half Life 2: Lost Coast, 5% in F.E.A.R., and 22% in Serious Sam II. It is obvious that F.E.A.R. is GPU constrained while the balance of games respond very well to increases in both CPU clocks and memory bandwidth. At the stock CPU/Memory settings we overclocked our EVGA 7900GTX from 650/800 to a safe 690/850 and were rewarded with 112fps compared to our top 114fps score in F.E.A.R.
What good is an article without some actual performance numbers? If you dozed off during the last couple of pages, hopefully this information should be more enjoyable. While we are not providing numbers from the entire test suite there is enough information here to draw conclusions about what general settings work best in some of today's latest game engines.
In our tests it is clear a balanced setting between maximizing the CPU clock speed while maintaining a 1:1 memory ratio with the lowest latency possible will provide the best results. No surprises there but we really expected the 9x312HTT settings to perform better. This leads us to wonder if our issues with the 9X multiplier are creating lower than anticipated results. Our favorite and highly recommended setting with this CPU/Memory/Motherboard combination is the 12x256HTT setting as it performs within 1% of the 10x300HTT setting while allowing a larger variety of memory module options to be utilized. The system also requires lower memory and chipset voltages with the added benefit of better memory timings when using higher performance modules.
In essence, you are placing your system's performance capability primarily on the CPU's ability to overclock instead of the CPU and Memory overclocks when operating at the 10x300HTT setting. There is some additional overclocking headroom on this board at the 12x256HTT setting while we just barely eked by with the 10x300HTT setup. A 12x260HTT (or higher) setting should match or exceed the 10x300HTT setup in actual application and game benchmarks.
When comparing the top results generated by the 10x300HTT setting to the stock settings we see a CPU speed increase of 25%, memory clock speed of 50%, and Sandra memory benchmarks increasing by 34%. However, this does not directly translate into the same percentage improvements in the game benchmarks. We notice an increase of 23% in Q4, 12% in Half Life 2: Lost Coast, 5% in F.E.A.R., and 22% in Serious Sam II. It is obvious that F.E.A.R. is GPU constrained while the balance of games respond very well to increases in both CPU clocks and memory bandwidth. At the stock CPU/Memory settings we overclocked our EVGA 7900GTX from 650/800 to a safe 690/850 and were rewarded with 112fps compared to our top 114fps score in F.E.A.R.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
23 Comments
View All Comments
cornfedone - Thursday, April 20, 2006 - link
It's been known by experienced PC builders for several years that Asus has been shipping mobos with a laundry lists of defects. This has been documented by any number of hardware review sites and hundreds of thousands of consumers. In addition Asus has been completely arrogant about these defective products, failing to properly fix or replace them and completely ignoring their customers after they were duped in to purchasing these defective products via misleading advertising and bogus reviews of hand-picked mobos.Asus needs a good class action lawsuit costing them a few hundred million dollars to get their act together and stop defrauding consumers. As long as people buy the defective products Asus has been shipping there is no incentive for Asus to sell properly functioning products. Asus has been on a downhill spiral since they launched the defective SLI series and every model mobo since seems to have major issues including vcore, memory, BIOS, etc. this is simply unacceptable for ANY mobo, let alone mobos being sold at a premium price and being marketed as "designed for serious overclockers" - which is blatant fraud IMNHO.
Until foolish sheep stop buying these defective mobos Asus won't provide a properly functioning Mobo.
phusg - Monday, April 24, 2006 - link
What SLI mobo manufacturer do you recommend then? I agree motherboards shouldn't be brought onto the market when they are nowhere near mature, but I doubt ASUS is alone in this...classy - Thursday, April 20, 2006 - link
When I see the results from overclocking it really makes one wonder why AMD is moving to ddr2 at this time. It is clear that there is still much life and very healthy life at that in ddr if amd went with a higher fsb.Gambit2K - Thursday, April 20, 2006 - link
They never answeared the question if the new bios fixed the problems people are having with soundblaster cards, the boot, the hickup issues most people are having. I recently flashed the 0404 bios and the hickup and the cold boot issues remains.Oh and I can't overclock my Samsung TCCD 10 mhz over stock, tried just about every bios setting there is. On my DFI Ultra-D my ram did 275-280 mhz without me even tweaking any of the settings.
When I buy a board I expect my computer to be able to restart and post 100% of the times, not 50-75% of the times too. I'll give ASUS until Conroe arrives to fix all of the issues or im selling the board and going on the intel train.
Gary Key - Thursday, April 20, 2006 - link
The SB X-FI needs to uninstalled when utilizing the Asus update program for bios changes, there is still a driver issue between the two items. I have a new set of X-FI beta drivers I will try shortly.
The only boot issue that remains in our testing is a limitation of the chipset when changing the HT multipliers. The board still requires a power down but this occurs on other ATI chipset boards. The warm reboot issue and power up issue with an overclocked setting was solved (at least for us and many others) with the 0311 bios.
We have no longer have the pauses in games with either the dual-core or single-core CPUs since the 0311 bios.
Actually, Samsung TCCD memory was our memory of choice on this board for overclocking. Email us and we will see if we can assist you.
ElFenix - Thursday, April 20, 2006 - link
pauses in games?i get pauses in movies and games with my A8R-MVP, i wonder if the fix that they applied here works and has been applied to the first A8R?
InuYasha - Thursday, April 20, 2006 - link
pow! right in the kisserFireTech - Thursday, April 20, 2006 - link
Can't wait for the DFI & ABIT test results....goinginstyle - Friday, April 21, 2006 - link
Hopefully the DFI/Abit reviews will show this kind of detail in overclocking and system settings. Really enjoyed the article and it is about time someone showed the effects overclocking the system has on gaming. Where are the min/max numbers? Your articles usually have those in the gaming scores.Marlowe - Thursday, April 20, 2006 - link
I've got the Sapphire A9RD580 PURE Crossfire here.. looks great, but very complicated to overclock.. I might just be very noobish though.. since it's my first AMD64 system.Board suffers from not having any supported voltage/temp monitoring programs tho.