Like any well built house, a proper performance computer needs a good foundation. This foundation comes in the form of a solid, feature rich motherboard. Asus, having been around for almost 20 years, has been known as a producer of such quality motherboards for at least half that time. Today we are looking at their latest and greatest, which sports the new AMD 790FX chipset and is a key component in the Spider platform.
That’s right, we’re checking out the M3A32-MVP Deluxe/WiFi-AP motherboard from Asus. This flagship motherboard from the well known manufacturer was upon release the first to use AMD’s newest chipset. This means full Phenom support, in addition to the slew of features and functions Asus adds to its top shelf motherboards. Here’s a quick run down of this motherboard’s features.
- Supports AMD® Socket AM2+ Phenom™ FX / Phenom X4 / Phenom X2 / Athlon™ X2 / Sempron™
- Supports AMD Socket AM2 Athlon 64 X2 / Athlon 64 FX / Athlon 64 / Sempron
- AMD 790FX Chipset
- HyperTransport 3.0 Support
- Native DDR2 1066 Support
- ATI CrossFireX™ Technology
- Multi-VGA support
- PCIe 2.0 support
- 100% All High-quality Conductive Polymer Capacitors
- ASUS WiFi-AP Solo
As always, the full spec list can found on the product home page.
The list of specifications sound impressive. Needless to say, Asus is rather upfront in its claims of victory; it’s right on their packaging. But regardless of cheesy slogans, the M3A32-MVP Deluxe/WiFi-AP motherboard is definitely in the high of motherboards. It’ll be interesting to see how well some of the features lend to our benchmarks. However before we can get to that, we need to check out what makes this board tick.
What’s In The Box?
When I said Asus tends to include a whole slew of accessories with its top shelf motherboards, I really wasn’t being facetious in any way. With the M3A32-MVP you of course get a selection of cables that includes four SATA cables, an IDE cable, a floppy cable, and a USB/FireWire header. These are fairly forgettable. Although they may be used, they will most likely end up in the spare parts bin. The more interesting bits come from both some nifty added features, and from the least likely of objects. We have additional cooling for your memory, external antennae, and a new take on the plate for the motherboard-bound rear ports. Let’s take a look.
First on the list of interesting features is the ASUS Cool Mempipe attachment. This right-angled chunk of copper is supposed to provide extra cooling for the DDR2 memory sitting in the primary channel. It may look like something targeted only at memory without heat spreaders, but the Mempipe is said to work perfectly with most heat spreaders. The whole apparatus attaches to the existing chipset block, and Asus notes it can reduce the temperature of the RAM by up to 10°C.
Now the ASUS Cool Mempipe does require airflow in the case to be effective. For those that use water cooling this may present a problem, as many water cooling setups don’t require a front to back flow of air to function. With that in mind, Asus included a small fan that can be attached to heatsink on the Mempipe. This will ensure that your memory stays cool in all conditions.
For the included Wi-Fi AP and network connection, Asus went a different route than the standard hard antenna. Rather than just have a black antenna sticking out from the back on the case, Asus included an external wired antenna that can be placed pretty well anywhere. Since the Wi-Fi can act as both AP and client, this should help with both finding the best signal coverage in client mode, and providing the best signal coverage when using it as an AP.
When it comes to installation Asus has included a couple accessories that should be standard issue with most motherboards. The first is the Q-Connector. These three connection blocks are meant to make installation of your front panel connectors much easier. First you plug in the connections to the requisite Q-Connector block, then you plug the block into the motherboard. This makes if far less of a struggle to connect individually wired USB ports, not to mention the annoying front panel LED and switch connections.
The other installation accessory that I rather liked was a new take on the old rear panel for all the motherboard bound ports. Rather than the simple stamped and folded aluminum, Asus went with stamped aluminum backed with a foam shield. Those that are familiar with problems related to the former bracket will be able to immediately see the benefit here, as it makes the board much easier to install without getting any of the ports caught on the tabs for the panel.
Layout and Design
As mentioned in the specifications, the Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe supports Crossfire X; ATI’s mutli-GPU specification that supports 3 or 4 discreet graphics cards. This is evidenced in the number and type of expansion slots onboard. This motherboard sports 4 x16 PCI Express slots, and two PCI 2.2 legacy slots.
Immediately below the expansion slots are the headers for the front panel audio, USB, and Firewire. There’s also a floppy connection, should you still need to use the languishing storage medium. Also present is the front panel LED and power connections, which should you use the afore mentioned Q-Connector should be very easy to setup.
Should you fill up those expansion slots, there shouldn’t be any stability or power issues. Rather than using electrolyte based capacitors, this motherboard uses only high quality conductive polymer capacitors. Not only will this prevent the capacitors from possibly bursting and leaking electrolyte (admittedly a problem that has almost been eliminated), but it will provide much cleaner power to the system and quite possibly assist in overclocking. At the very least, it’ll give you the extra headroom to connect a whole host of peripherals.
As for drives and peripherals, the M3A32-MVP Deluxe comes with a total of six SATA ports and a single IDE port. All six ports do support RAID in 0, 1, and 0+1 flavours, but the implementation isn’t universal. Four of the ports are driven by the AMD southbridge, and the other two ports are taken care of by a Marvel 88SE6121 SATA2 controller soldered to the board. Now you may think that the red ports are the Marvel controller, and the black ports are the AMD. That would be incorrect; the red and middle black ports are the AMD controller and the Marvel controller drives the outside black ports. This is somewhat confusing for those of us too stubborn or impatient to read the manual (read: me), but it is documented. There is also an eSATA port on the rear.
On the rear panel, you will find a very legacy unfriendly setup. The only old school port is a PS/2 keyboard plug, and that’s just to concede that USB keyboards still aren’t as ubiquitous as the USB connector itself. Otherwise you’ll find six USB ports, one FireWire port, Gigabit Ethernet, 6 channel sound with optical and coaxial SPDIF output, and slightly cut-off from the picture the connector for the Wi-Fi antenna.
Software
Asus includes a small cadre of home grown software with the M3A32-MVP Deluxe motherboard. Some of it is useful, and some it is replicated by other better applications provided by other component manufacturers. You’re mileage may vary on preference, so were just going to go through all of them.
AI Suite is Asus’ overclocking tool. From here you can monitor and change core speed, multipliers, and voltages. Use of this tool is dependant on your BIOS settings, and may be disabled if you turn off it’s functionality in the BIOS. I would rate this as moderately useful, but it is overshadowed by AMD OverDrive. The latter program offers much more tweaking on the AMD platform.
Asus Update is fairly self explanatory I think; it allows you to update the BIOS via the internet. You can also backup the existing BIOS should you need to. Very useful indeed.
Cool & Quiet is a simple monitoring program that tells you in real time your processor speed and core voltage. Though simple is good, this functionality is available from such applications as CPU-Z, AMD OverDrive, and Asus’ own AI Suite. You’re mileage may vary.
PC Probe is Asus’ quick and dirty version of Motherboard Monitor. It shows you temperatures for all sensors onboard, voltages for all channels, fan speeds, and more. This is useful for when you just want to monitor everything and not overclock. It’s a great companion to AMD OverDrive, as it loads much quicker.
Installation and Setup
Here’s the specifications of the rig used to test the M3A32-MVP Deluxe…
- AMD Phenom 9600 Black Edition 2.3GHz Quad Core CPU
- Foxconn 9800GTX-512N NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX 512MB PCIe Video Card
- OCZ Platinum XTC REV.2 PC2-6400 2GB 2X1GB DDR2-800 Memory Kit
- Seagate Barracuda 500GB 7200.10 16MB SATA2 Hard Drive
- Cooler Master Hyper 212 CPU Cooler
- Antec P182 Advanced Super Mid Tower Case
- Thermaltake Toughpower 1000W Power Supply
- Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate RTM
Installation of the Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe was fairly straight forward. Only a couple issues crept up as we installed and setup the motherboard with out test rig.
The first issue we encountered was with the installation of the RAM we were originally going to use for testing. Originally we were going to run this test rig with a really nice Mushkin DDR2-800 kit, and even got them all snug and clamped into the Mempipe. Unfortunately the heat spreaders on the chips interfered with the cooler we were using.
When we switched over to the OCZ kit, we were able to install our cooler just fine. This was all due to the positioning of the first and third RAM slots. If you are using a large cooler similar to the one used in our test rig, you’ll find that the first RAM slot tends to be positioned directly under the fan of the cooler. I’ve seen this problem before with several motherboards. Basically you’ll need to be aware of what components you are using, and if you are using RAM with a large cooling device, you may need to use slots 2 and 4. Luckily the Mempipe can adjust to these slots.
There is one issue we need to touch on that, although we didn’t experience, that has been noted in other publications. That issue is the position and orientation of the SATA ports. If you are using a case that is short in depth, and has a hard drive rack or other apparatus near the bottom, it may interfere with connecting the SATA cables. Our Antec P182 is definitely long enough to accommodate all our equipment, but there are cases our there that may not be so suitable. Once again this is a situation where someone building a system from scratch will need to be aware of.
Synthetic Benchmarks
To benchmark the Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe/WiFi-AP motherboard we selected a list of benchmarks that would test memory, hard drive, and CPU performance. When it comes to motherboards, these factors are what separates the wheat from the chaff. First up in our round of tests is SiSoftware Sandra. This program contains within it several benchmarks that cover everything from processor performance to USB throughput. For the purposes of this review, we highlighted three particular tests.
The first of our three test Sandra run is the Processor Arithmetic benchmark. In these tests we used the results database built into Sandra for comparisons sake. Needless to say, the equivalent motherboard with Intel silicon wins this round. But it’s interesting to note that Sandra’s database shows the Phenom 9600 performing better than what is in our test rig. Unfortunately it’s not a significant lead, and as I discovered the database results use faster RAM. With that in mind I would call this motherboard a good performer on the AMD platform.
Processor Multimedia saw a little more consistency between the results database and the actual hardware. This means that now we’ve isolated testing to where just raw processing speed is affecting the results. The M3A32-MVP Deluxe is definitely looking better in this test. I’m sure we would see better results given a faster processor.
With the Memory Bandwidth test, we once again see our test rig come in lower than the same setup used in the results database. Given the same amount and type of memory, this board performs just as well as its contemporaries.
Up next we ran through all the tests featured in Futuremark’s PCMark 2005. The overall was pretty well the same we got from the tests performed in our review of the Phenom 9600 Black Edition. With that in mind we dug deeper to see how each of the important sub-systems scored. Compared to other systems tested, the CPU performance was in the mid range, with the HDD and Memory pulling ahead.
Overall the M3A32-MVP Deluxe is looking like a good performer in our synthetic tests. Now we need to run some real world tests, starting with video encoding and finishing with some excellent game play
Once again we ripped and re-encoded Stargate and Equilibrium to iPod Video AVC to see how well they performed on our test rig. As noted in previous reviews, Stargate’s longer running time and most importantly much brighter scenes puts more stress on the test rig than the dark and brooding Equilibrium.
Gaming Benchmarks
For gaming, we had to pick the two best stress tests we could think of. We needed titles that didn’t just thrash the GPU; they needed to lay a beating to all components in the system. The first choice was obvious, as Supreme Commander is an RTS of epic scale. With its expansive, world spanning play style, you do need a decent system to run it. With settings cranked, it can be downright hostile to a performance system. In addition to that, we ran Crysis. This first person shooter is one of the latest DX10 titles to market, and with destructible buildings (and enemies) its physics and AI put a good deal of strain on the processor and memory. We still ran our tests at multiple resolutions to see how big the split was between results.
To test Supreme Commander we cranked everything to maximum, added a little anti-aliasing for flavour. What we found was interesting, as there was only an 8% performance difference between the two resolutions. The reason this is interesting is because there is 26.5% more pixels on the screen. This means that the performance can for the most part be chalked up to other subsystems like CPU, Memory, and Hard Drive; a theory that is further given credence by the performance log for SupComMark showing a remarkably high FPS count for both tests. How does this all tie in? Well an 8% drop in performance with such a resolution jump is nothing to sneeze at, and shows that the M3A32-MVP Deluxe performs very well.
Now we move to the system dominator known as Crysis. This follows well in the footsteps of it’s spiritual predecessor Far Cry, in that it’s pure punishment on computers that are considered modern around the time of the title’s release. We ran both the CPU and GPU benchmarks separately, and found the same thing we found in the Supreme Commander tests. The performance drop between resolutions was relatively insignificant on the CPU tests, indicating once again the the Asus board performs well and handles high performance games with aplomb.
Final Thoughts and Conclusion
It’s really hard to find any faults with the Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe/WiFi-AP motherboard. For a motherboard on the AMD platform it performs quite well. Its exclusivity is also a benefit, as it’s only one of a handful of motherboards on the market that support the new socket AM2+. The performance was indeed nothing to sneeze at, and neither was the accessory package. Asus not only included the necessities with this board, but they went further with some well thought out additions to the whole package.
Asus included every cable and connector you could need, and then threw in a few “would be nice” items. The Q-Connector, for something so small and simple, was VERY welcome when installing this board. The construction of the board was also thought out, and the use of the solid capacitors should provide clean consistent power to even the most rapacious of system configurations. Add to that the Mempipe accessory, and any fears power users have about system stability should be pretty well put to rest.
There’s always that one nagging caveat; the one I used in the first sentence of the first paragraph. For the AMD platform this board is a good performer. It still gets spanked around heavily by it’s contemporaries from the Intel camp in all tests. Even in our attempts to overclock the processor we were met with limited success. With all the being said, the blame for these shortcomings lies at the feet of the manufacturer of the silicon in the socket. One has to remember that we are still in the infancy of this new platform from AMD. They have slipped up on initial release, and hopefully they can get it together. We can’t blame Asus.
So where does that leave us? It’s hard to say no to this board. Asus had left it wanting for nothing. The selection and implementation of ports ensure that you can connect any device you need, and with external ports like eSATA you have some future proofing. The accessory package is well stocked. Finally everything is easy to install. The board does carry a power user price tag, with street prices topping $230. But if you are looking for a good performance motherboard to anchor your AMD based performance system, you need look no further than the Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe/WiFi-AP motherboard. It’s worth the price.
The Good
- Excellent performance
- Easy Installation
- Comprehensive accessory kit
- Future-proof port selection and implementation
The Bad
- Some fit issues with installation
- Excellent performance for an AMD motherboard
Overall Rating: 9.0/10.0
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