Asus A8R32-MVP Deluxe Review – ATI Radeon XPress 3200 Chipset

Overclocking Success and System Setup

Overclocking Success

Of course we had to take the new Asus A8R32-MVP for a little overclocking run.  To do this I took our testing Athlon X2 4800+ processor, with default settings like this:

Without breaking stride, I pushed the multiplier down to 8x and jumped right up to 300 MHz bus speed:

Taking it down one more multiplier setting to 7x, I pushed it to 320 MHz:

I then tried 350 MHz, 340 MHz and 330 MHz, all failing at some point or another.  325 MHz seemed to be my maximum HT bus speed and I upped the multiplier to 8x for good measure.

You can see the memory was then running at 216 MHz or 433 MHz DDR at decent timings, though I probably could have gone tighter on them. 

Just to wet the whistle a bit, here is a single benchmark on 3DMark06’s CPU tests with the stock 4800+ vs. the mildly overclocked 4800+:

The most impressive part of this feat was that I never budged the voltages on the CPU above 1.4v and everything else went on default voltages and settings.  The overclocking was incredibly easy as well as the motherboard responded well to quick jumps in HyperTransport speeds without batting an eye. 

ATI may just have the best overclocking chipset we have ever seen.

System Setup and Testing Methodology

As I mentioned earlier, we are using a nearly completely new testing suite so I’ll be sure to point out the benchmarks that we are using on each page, what they are doing and look at the results as well.

Benchmarks:

• SiSoft Sandra 2005.SR3
• Everest Ultimate Edition 2006
• World Bench 5
• Windows Media Encoder 9
• DivX 6.1
• LAME MT
• CineBench 9.5
• SPECviewperf 8.01
• WinRAR 3.51
• 3DMark06
• FEAR 1.03
• Call of Duty 2 1.01
• PCMark05
• HDTach 3.0.1.0
• RightMark 3DSound
• RightMark AudioAnalyzer
• NTTTCP