Asus A8R-MVP Xpress 200 CrossFire Edition Review

Overclocking, Included Extras and Test Setup

Overclocking

Using the same 4000+ Athlon 64 processor we have used in our motherboard reviews for somet time, I set out to see just how easily the board could overclock.  I didn’t try to tweak every last little setting to get the fastest bus speed, highest frequency or anything like that; we have dedicated forum members for that.  I just like to see that board vendors have made it easy for casual gamers and enthusiasts to play around. 

Stock settings (we don’t quite see 200.00 MHz anymore do we.)

An easy 262 MHz FSB with a 10x multiplier.

And still running at pretty quick memory timings too

As you can see, the CrossFire chipset does a pretty good job of overclocking, as we have been heearing about for some time. 

Included Extras

Being a more budget-minded motherboard, the A8R-MVP doesn’t come with a big box full of stuff for you.  Instead, you get two SATA cables, a SATA power adaptor, a USB/Firewire header cable, drivers and IDE cables. 

Test Setup

Our test setup continues with our trend for motherboard and chipset reviews, using an Athlon 64 4000+ processor but a switch to the GeForce 7800 GTX graphics card. Since this is a motherboard review, we will focus on what features and performance the motherboard brings to the table in as close a comparison as possible to the competing products.  

The benchmarks used were:

• SiSoft Sandra 2005
• Everest
• 3DMark05
• Far Cry 1.33
• Doom 3 v1.3
• LAME MP3 Encoding
• XMPEG / DivX Encoding
• WinRAR Compression
• World Bench 5
• PCMark04
• CineBench 2003
• SPECviewperf 8.0
• HD Tach – USB Performance
• NTTTCP – Network Performance