General Performance

There is little to distinguish or detract from the Asus A8R-MVP in Winstone benchmarks. The Asus board is competitive with the best Socket 939 Athlon 64 boards that we have tested. We have already established that the ATI chipset competes well with other AMD chipsets. Performance in Winstones falls in the center of tightly clustered performance.

General Usage Performance

Content Creation Performance

General Performance

However, PCMark 2005 is another story, as the A8R-MVP outperforms any board that we have recently tested. Part of this is the improved performance of the 81.85 drivers, but the A8R-MVP also outperforms the Dual x16 NVIDIA board, also from Asus, that we recently tested with the same 81.85 drivers. While we are no longer reporting PCMark 2004 performance, we did run the test just to check against out PCM05 results. The pattern was the same, with the A8R-MVP outperforming all other AMD boards that we have tested in PCMark 2004.

Test Setup Graphics Performance and Encoding
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  • Wesley Fink - Friday, December 9, 2005 - link

    The PCIe giagbit cards should deliver the same performance as on-board PCIe Gigabit Ethernet. They generally use the same chips as on-board or variants f those chips. You can use the x1 PCIe slot with Crossfire IF your cards are single width. If the video cards are double width the PCIe x1 is blocked.

    We have a Syskonnect PCIe Gigabit Ethernet card and it uses the Marvel 88E8052 chip.
  • Ryan Norton - Monday, December 5, 2005 - link

    ...just wrote them basically begging for availibility info on this board. Anand's article has gotten me very very hyped for this product as a cheap SLI replacement for my MSI Neo4 Ultra -- HALF the price of an A8N32 seems like it can't be beat. For all that's worth, however, I still haven't found a single user experience with this board -- have the lucky people who have it (if there are any) forgotten about the internet?
  • imaheadcase - Thursday, December 8, 2005 - link

    It is now in stock at newegg
  • YellowWing - Monday, November 28, 2005 - link

    This board looks good for a HTPC, but I have one question about the HD audio, you do not mention if this board will do a real time encode of Dolby Digital on that coaxial SPDIF port. My minimum requirements for a HTPC main board include passive cooling and Dolby Digital out either optical or coaxial to connect with my home theater receiver. I would appreciate a standard line in each motherboard review that makes the Dolby Digital out capability of each main board clear.

    Keep up the great work.
  • imaheadcase - Monday, November 28, 2005 - link

    Man all these sweet deals at newegg but don't have this board yet :(
  • ElFenix - Saturday, November 26, 2005 - link

    thanks for all the updates, wes!
  • rjm55 - Friday, November 25, 2005 - link

    This looks like the perfect Socket 939 board. It's fast, passive-cooling, great overclocker, and cheap!! Even uses the ATI chipset and is built by the biggest board maker in the world, so how could I go wrong. Just put 2 on order at Buy.com. At $105 each they seemed like a perfect board for some Christmas builds.
  • Zebo - Saturday, November 26, 2005 - link

    Is'nt most of chipset in AMD CPU these days? I would'nt worry about that.
  • xsilver - Thursday, November 24, 2005 - link

    does asus ship this board with overclocking software for overclocking while booted in windows? what other mobo companies offer this? (I find this feature very handy on my abit)
    its most convienient to boot up and surf and run stock speeds and then overclock to play a game and then change back when you're finished

    I know utilities like rmclock and cpucool can do this but they dont work for all mobo's
  • Wesley Fink - Thursday, November 24, 2005 - link

    Yes, Asus includes some very good windows-based OC software with the A8R-MVP. AI Booster allows the control of OC in windows, and PC Probe 2 allows fan control and voltage/temperature monitoring. AMDZone descibes these software utilities in their A8R-MVP preview at http://www.amdzone.com/modules.php?op=modload&...">http://www.amdzone.com/modules.php?op=m...q=viewar...

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