Board layout

While the original A8R-MVP donned an unassuming, almost boring board design/layout, ASUS has pulled out all the stops for the A8R32-MVP Deluxe. Like all of ASUS’ high-end motherboards, the board sports ASUS’ distinctive black PCB, while shorter capacitors surround the CPU socket (in comparison to the A8R-MVP). The caps are now even shorter than the heatsink retention bracket. This change provides more clearance for larger heatsinks and is commonly found on many of the newer nForce4 SLI X16 motherboards.

Another aspect that you’ll immediately notice is that the Xpress 3200 North Bridge and ULi M1575 South Bridge chips are both passively cooled – other than a heatsink, no fans are used to cool the system chipset, allowing the motherboard to operate silently. In comparison, on the nForce4 SLI platform, this has only been achieved to date by using costlier copper heat pipes to cool the chipset. With Xpress 3200 a simple aluminum heatsink is more than enough to suffice. This is due in part because ATI’s Xpress 3200 North Bridge is built on TSMC’s 110-nm manufacturing process. For nForce4 SLI, NVIDIA still uses TSMC’s larger 150-nm. The Xpress 3200 die itself is also tiny, according to ATI it measures only 39 square millimeters, and consists of 22 million transistors. That’s only slightly greater than the 21 million transistors in nForce4 SLI’s South Bridge!

Another criticism of the original A8R-MVP Deluxe was the limited amount of space between the PCI Express graphics slots: dual-slot cards like the Radeon X1800 XT and X1900 XT/XTX fit on the motherboard, but there was hardly any clearance space once two cards were used.

Fortunately ASUS has rectified this problem for the A8R32-MVP Deluxe, providing roughly an extra inch between the two graphics slots.


All isn’t quite perfect with the A8R32-MVP Deluxe’s board layout however, as ASUS places the board’s only x1 PCI Express expansion slot directly underneath the primary graphics slot. This means if you own a dual-slot graphics card, you’ll effectively lose the use of this slot. While the lack of PCI Express-based devices (outside of graphics) today lessens the severity of this problem, in the future once PCI Express components become more common this could be a huge issue for A8R32-MVP users. ASUS probably should have placed this slot above the primary x16 graphics slot rather than below it.