Review: ASUS M2R32-MVP Radeon Xpress 3200 CrossFire motherboard

by Steve Kerrison on 31 August 2006, 08:36

Tags: ASUSTeK (TPE:2357)

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qagor

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System setup and notes

System setup

HEXUS high-end test system
Processor AMD Athlon 64 FX-62 (2.8GHz, 2MiB L2 cache, AM2)
Motherboard ASUS CROSSHAIR ASUS M2N32-SLI Wireless Edition abit KN9 SLI ATI Sturgeon Reference ASUS M2R32-MVP
Actual CPU speed 2812.7MHz - 200.9MHz FSB 2812.8MHz - 200.9MHz FSB 2813MHz - 200.9MHz FSB 2813MHz - 200.9MHz FSB 2804.4MHz - 200.3MHz FSB
Memory 2GBytes (2 x 1GByte) Corsair EPP
Memory timings 4-4-4-12 2T @ DDR2-800
Graphics card(s) NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX SLI Radeon X1900 CrossFire
Disk drive(s) Seagate 160GB 7200.9 SATA 3Gbps
BIOS revision 0121 (07/24/06) 0504 (06/14/06) 1.12 (18/05/06) 08.00.13 (04/05/2006) 1028 (07/28/06)
Mainboard software 9.34 Catalyst 6.6 Southbridge package +
2.5.1540.25 (ATI AHCI SATA driver)
Catalyst 6.8 Southbridge package +
2.5.1540.28 (ATI AHCI SATA driver)
Graphics driver ForceWare 91.27 Catalyst 6.6 Catalyst 6.8
Operating System Windows XP Pro SP2 32-bit

Testing software

  • ScienceMark Memory Bandwidth
  • ScienceMark Memory Latency
  • HEXUS.pifast
  • KribiBench
  • HEXUS WAV encoding
  • HEXUS DivX encoding
  • Cinebench 2003

For 3D performance we used:

  • Far Cry v1.33
  • Quake 4 v1.04
  • Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory v1.05

All games were run at 1024x768. We also ran SC:CT at 1920x1200 in single and dual-GPU modes to verify that the boards could handle multi-GPU scenarios aptly. Cat 6.8 also sees a new SATA driver, but the version number difference is only small.

Notes

We used Catalyst 6.8 drivers on our X1900 XTX CrossFire setup, so expect 3D results to differ (in a positive sense) from the Sturgeon reference board.

The CPU clock recovered from CPU-Z is a few MHz lower than the other boards. This shouldn't make a difference, but if we spot any fractional deficits, this could be part of the reason.

Ready? Let's go.