ASUS A8R32-MVP Deluxe Motherboard Review

The Layout:

One look at this board and you can see that is just screams “look at me!” I have always loved black PCB, so maybe it is my own bias, but I certainly like this color over some of the other colors we have seen lately.

A look at the top right of the board reveals our 4 DIMM slots that officially support Dual-Channel mode up to DDR400, with a maximum of 4GB DDR1 installed memory. We can also see the two included IDE connectors at the edge of the board, and right above those is the 24-pin power connector. Above the dimm slots we can see the CPU socket, and to the left of that the Northbridge heatsink. This NB heatsink is just a little close to the CPU HSF mount, which made installation of the Corsair Nautilus a little tricky, but not impossible.

Here we see the bottom right corner of the board. Notice the small aluminum heatsink on the southbridge. Though it is small, it is more than enough for cooling the southbridge. It barely even got warm to the touch while we were doing our testing. Right next to the heatsink we see four SATA connectors. These are powered by the ULI southbridge and are SATAII compliant, running at data transfer rates of 3.0 Gb/s, and supporting RAID 0/1, 5. Underneath the SB heatsink we see the bios chip, and to the left of the the clear cmos jumper and battery. On the far right edge, we can see the floppy connector, which, if you use, seems to be in an appropriate place on the board. Underneath that we see the front panal connection pins that are color coded for ease of identification. You also have your assortment of USB and Firewire headers here.

Here we see two PCI Express x16 graphics slots, one PCI Express x1 I/O slot, and three PCI slots. This board is able to run two ATI video cards (one being a Crossfire edition card) in Crossfire for the highest gaming performance possible. If you do run Crossfire on this board, you will lose the pcie xs1 slot as well as the top PCI slot, so keep that in mind, although for most, this will not be an issue. Our audio chip is also located on this part of the board. Audio is powered by the integrated Realtek ALC882 controller which is fully Sound Blaster compatible, featureing 7.1+2 Channel High Definition Audio codecs and full-duplex 5 24-bit two-channel DACs and 3 stereo 20-bit ADCs.

Taking a look at the top left of the board reveals a few interesting things. First off, right behind the bottom lan port on the board is another SATA connector. This one is powered by the Silicon Image 3132 SATA Link Controller, which is also SATAII compliant. To the left of that we can see the mosfets are passively cooled with an aluminum heatsink. To the left of that, we have our four-pin power connector. The back I/O port include your typical PS/2 mouse and keyboard port, 6 analog audio jacks, 2 S/PDIF connectors, 2 RJ45 LAN ports, 4 USB 2.0/1.1 ports and most interesting is the inclusion of an e-SATA connector. This is controlled by the Silicon Image 3132 SATA controller that we had mentioned previously. There are not alot of external SATA devices yet, but It will be a nice feature to have once we see external SATA Optical devices and the like really hit the market.

That is all that is really interesting on this board. Let’s move on and see what else we get with this board!