Ports and features, BIOS
It's good to see ASUS free themselves from the shackles of the archaic parallel port, but it seems the resulting void isn't used for anything. There is, however, eSATA and FireWire, both of which we like to see on modern boards as external storage connectivity options.
Both northbridge and southbridge are passively cooled on this board, no fancy heatpipes either. We don't want to sound like a broken record, but as always, a well ventilated case will be required to keep the temperatures of these components down.
BIOS
BIOS options aren't as plentiful as, say, ATI's Sturgeon reference board (which had southbridge voltage settings, for example) or the Socket 939 A8R32-MVP. It should be possible to implement more options, and ASUS could well do for the final product. Current significant options are listed below:
| Option | Adjustments possible |
|---|---|
| HT Reference Clock | 200-400MHz (1MHz increments) |
| CPU FID | x5-CPU MAX |
| PEG Reference Clock | 100-150MHz (1MHz increments) |
| HT Multiplier (CPU-NB) | 1-5x (x1 increments) |
| Memory Clock | 200/266/333/400MHz |
| CPU Core voltage | 0.8-1.5625v (0.0125v increments) |
| Vcore Over-voltage | Auto, Enabled, Disabled (seems to boost VCore by approximately +120mv above nominal when set to Enabled) |
| Memory VDIMM | 1.80-2.45v (0.05v increments) |
| NB Voltage | 1.20-1.50v (0.10v increments) |
| HT Voltage (CPU-NB) | 1.20-1.50v (0.10v increments) |
We tried our hand at overclocking the board to see just how high we could get the FSB. James, using his mad overclocking skillz, obtained 325MHz with the CPU and memory clocked back so that we were testing only the FSB. That's not the best o/c we've had on AM2 motherboards, lagging behind nForce 5.
An interesting quirk in the BIOS, is that USB devices are given boot priority if they're present when the system is powered up. That means if any are attached when attempting to boot from hard disk, the boot order will need changing. Hopefully ASUS will change this behaviour.
Bundle
In our bundle was an incomplete manual (we imagine it'll be finished come release), driver CD, USB expansion bracket, I/O shield, IDE, floppy and SATA data cables along with a SATA power cable and finally, Q-Connector attachments. Q-Connector is a neat idea from ASUS that allows all the fiddly case wiring to be hooked up to a block that then just plugs into the motherboard's headers. It saves having to fit your fingers into tight corners and give you a fighting chance at attaching the cables to the correct pins.
Features and issues
Sound is provided through an AD1988 chipset. However, this particular model lacks DTS-Connect or Dolby Digital Live support.
There's no POST diagnostic readout on this board, so users must rely on old school beeps for feedback, which aren't always as informative.
CrossFire worked fine for us once we'd fiddled with a driver installation. The cards detected OK first time around but the drivers didn't install correctly. We can't place blame for this one right now, so it could well be a driver issue and not board related. Regardless, CrossFire worked in the end.
Once again, we have an ASUS AM2 board with faulty Cool 'n' Quiet support (the third to pass through our labs recently). With the feature enabled, we couldn't run our testing RAM at 4-4-4-12 2T timings, but it worked fine with SPD settings. Turning it off eradicates the problem.
Finally, AMD Live is supported, but the manual mentions nothing of it.