ASUS A8R-MVP Motherboard (Athlon X2/ Athlon 64/ Sempron, Socket 939, Radeon Xpress 200 Crossfire, ATX, 4GB DDR, 1GHz Bus)

• Reviewed by:

  Strengths: SLI, SATA II, FireWire and GB Ethernet.

  Weaknesses: Lack of support from ASUS...

  Overall: If it's rebooting every five minutes, try turning off the "Cool and Quiet" in the bios. With it enabled, the CPU fan may not be spinning (check it visually), causing the CPU to overheat--and reboot.

• Reviewed by: TechMage89

  Strengths: Great while it lasted...

  Weaknesses: Frequent bluescreens, memory won't run stably in 1T mode, overclocking destablizes the system much more rapidly than it should

  Overall: One year is not an adequate lifespan for a motherboard, especially a $200 one. I never attempted extreme overclocking, but I now get random blue screens of death in windows and segfaults in linux. My memory is not at fault: it has been tested thoroughly and is good. The processor also shows no problems. But the frequent (and totally random, both in timing and in message) blue screens have led me to believe that there are problems in the chipset or hypertransport bus. My processor (a athlon64 X2 3800+) and memory are reported to be capable of a 20% overclock with few problems, but the computer wouldn't even start with a 13% overclock. A very poor quality motherboard.

• Reviewed by: jaytmoon

  Strengths: The Box it comes in, SATA and IDE plug placement

  Weaknesses: the product quality and reliability inside.

  Overall: I bought this MB before (unfortunatly) I came across these reviews. I have built over 300 PC's professionally and have sworn by Asus for quality in the past. No More! Although this board LOOKS good on paper but, it does not deliver on any of the claims. Its unstable, buggy and not likely to last more than a week in service. No Overclocking of any kind but mine died after 3 days of attempting to de-bug and troubleshoot just to get it running. Sorry Asus, but you've just lost another customer...

• Reviewed by: danparker276

  Strengths: Looks like a good deal. Pictures and the lies they tell.

  Weaknesses: Crashes ever 5 min, their bios update tool doesn't work.

  Overall: This worked ok for 1 month. Now it crashes every 5 min. I thought it was a video card at first, so I bought a second video card, but it does the same thing. Well at least I'll have crossfire when I get a new motherboard from a different company.Oh and their update update tool doesn't work. Not a big deal to go to the site and download the latest one. But why even include that software if it doesn't work. Just another example of their commitment to Excrement.

• Reviewed by: HookeyStreet

  Strengths: It comes in a nice box!

  Weaknesses: EVERYTHING! Overclocking, 1T RAM timing support, highly bugged BIOS etc

  Overall: Very poor 2x sticks of RAM @ 1T support (which is very strange) Very bad at overclocking (which is even stranger as it was advertised as an 'overclockers dream') Random crashes, during gameplay and general use! I feel totally cheated by ASUS and wont be using them in the future as they have just given up trying to fix these problems and dont respond to emails about this motherboards very poor functionality! AVOID! AVOID! AVOID! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!