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LOSTCIRCUITS	SHORTCUTS: An In-house chipset for AMD At One Glance What You Get Layout and VRM Integrated Peripherals BIOS Test Configuration and Overclocking Memory Performance TrueSpace POVRay Cinebench 2003 Video Encoding FarCry Prey, DOOM3 F.E.A.R. 3DMark Final Words Comment in the LostCircuits Forums
ASUS M2R32 MVP Clocking like a Banshee
(Review by MS, Dec. 19, 2006)

Test Configuration

Benchmark Overview

We used the followig benchmarks:

• SiSoft Sandra 2007
• Cachemem 2.65
• Caligari TrueSpace 5.1
• POVRay
• Cinebench 2003
• 3DMark2005
• 3DMark2006
• Call of Duty2
• DOOM3
• FarCry
• F.E.A.R.
• Prey
• MainConcept H.264
• Dr. DivX OSS
• DVD-Shrink 3.2

Overclocking

The R580 has a reputation of being able to run at insane clock frequencies. In our first encounter with the chipset in the form of Sapphire's Pure Crossfire AM2RD580 board, we were a bit disappointed by the obvious discrepancy of the reality and our expectations since the board hardly got above the nominal values. On the other hand, the Sapphire board compensated with pretty insane performance, leaving essentially every comparable contender in the dust. Given the perpetually small number of hardcore overclockers, this is definitely the other way to position a board in the market, but ASUS obviously abides by a different philosophy, that is, pushing it to the limits.

One thing to say upfront, though: Forget about NOS and AI overclocking, they are just the equivalent of rally stripes, that is window dressing without any real value. The fun starts, though, when the manual configuration is selected. We started at 300 MHz clock input with the HT multiplier turned down to a save 3x for nominal 900MHz on the HyperTransport interface and the memory reduced to a tame 533 frequency, which resulted after all in 800 MHz data rate.

Increasing the bus speed to 325 MHz with an 8x multiplier and a DDR2-533 selection results in a 1/6 memory divider for a 434 MHz memory clock (868 MHz data rate) which turned out a respectable speed for our venerable OCZ PC26400 kit, especially at 4-4-4-12 latency settings. Still, every application was working at this speed, the only exception being SLI functionality in 3DMark '06. However, SLI was fully functional in any other application. With respect to 3DMark06, it is also necessary to keep in mind that the system is neither meant nor qualified to run two GeForce 7800 GTs in SLI mode - in other words, there is no point in holding this particular glitch against the system. Moreover, as mentioned above, every other real game was working just fine under these conditions - with SLI!

   

   

Increasing the CPU multiplier to 9x for a total clock frequency of 2930 MHz (AMD stock cooler) forces a memory divider of 1/7 to drop the memory frequency down to 418 MHz - still respectable. Under those conditions, the system was working flawlessly, regardless of what we threw at it.

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