Asus A8R-MVP, Continued
In terms of mass storage there are four Serial ATA II ports with support for NCQ and two UltraATA channels. Thanks to ULi’s M1575 Southbridge, RAID levels 0, 1 and 0+1 are supported, which both DFI and MSI currently do not (RAID 0, 1) support. One drawback is the Gigabit Ethernet chip : Marvell’s E8001 is a PCI component only, which can be a bottleneck if several PCI devices are used at the same time. Firewire 400 (1394a), high definition 7.1 audio and both serial and parallel ports can be found on this motherboard. Asus also is the only supplier that provides PCI Express slots that lock down the graphics card. This may be important for system builders that have to ship their machines. In exchange, there is no optical audio output, but a coaxial one only.
Changing the HT PLL Control setting caused our system to crash with our regular Corsair XMS memory, the cause of which we were unable to determine. However, the Crucial 1 GB DIMMs that we used for benchmarking worked just fine. Still, we couldn’t see any improvement with HT PLL Control enabled.
