ASUS M3A32-MVP Deluxe

Four graphics cards in Crossfire powering down a two card highway...

Four graphics cards and support for four cores; this motherboard has gone one better than a threesome on both accounts.

The ASUS M3A32-MVP Deluxe, other than having an annoying product name, sports the recently released 790FX north bridge from AMD. This new chipset brings a number of new features to the table. These features include 42 dedicated PCI Express lanes directly from the north bridge, HyperTransport 3.0 with support for HTX, PCIe 2.0 support, four physical PCIe x16 slots, and with this the ability to run Crossfire X.

The inclusion of the 790FX chipset makes the motherboard one of three pieces needed to construct the AMD ‘Spider’ platform. This platform is specified to include a 790FX based motherboard, Phenom 9000 series quad core processor and ATI Radeon HD3800 series GPUs. The GPUs, due to the four physical PCIe x16 slots can be arranged in a traditional two card Crossfire configuration with two 16x electrical connection or can also be set up in the new Crossfire X configuration. Crossfire X supports either three or four cards in a multi GPU arrangement. In this layout, the slots revert from 16x electrical to 8x electrical so as to feed the extra GPUs. This results in either a 8x+8x+8x or 8x+8x+8x+8x system.

Supplying all of these packages into one tidy board, the M3A32-MVP Deluxe offers a solid basis for the Spider platform. This support comes in the form of 8+2 phase power control for the socket area – eight for the CPU and two for the HT link. This is a well laid out board designed to assure optimum PCIe x16 layout for multi GPU support, Phenom 9000 series support and use of all solid state capacitors.

The ASUS M3A32-MVP Deluxe is a strong building block for AMD’s current flagship platform.