Just spotted this entry on the DH forums too - thought it may be of interest..
"My re-post as it has some potential relevance to the fun A8R32 release:
I'm finally at liberty to say that the big huge long threads that I started here and on Rage3d about the Asus A8R-MVP + CAT 6.2/6.3 cpu hits had been confirmed by ATI labs several weeks ago. After all that testing... and all that time... we discovered it was an Asus motherboard defect, not a problem with the Catalyst drivers. The newer Catalyst 6.2/6.3 drivers enhanced an existing problem with the Asus motherboard on X1800/X1900 boards with 512 Meg of RAM. It is a single CPU register being incorrectly set by the ASUS bios, which results in writes across the PCIE bus going at half speed.
So I found the problem with the board/card - but ATI did the engineering to resolve the problem. Asus has sent an updated BIOS to ATI that does correct the issue, but stability tests have not been completed and there's no information on when/if this BIOS will be posted.
The irony? After the hundreds of hours I put into narrowing down this problem, the extra work ATI had to do to with their drivers to isolate the exact problem - is if Asus had simply responded to my initial requests for help I'd never have even posted these problems here. Lack of proper testing and (in my own opinion, not ATI's opinion) poor engineering has made the A8R-MVP and the A8R32 needlesssly problematic for everyone. If Asus bothered to monitor their own forums, respond to tech e-mails, read their own webforms... they could have run a simple test and seen this too. But instead it took a lot of effort from a lot of people to get Asus to listen. This is not satisfactory for a Tier-1 manufacturer, and to me, there appears to be massive disconnect between levels of managment, support and engineering at Asus.
I'd like to thank ATI, DH, and Rage3d for providing an outlet for our frustrations and concerns, without the help of which many of us Asus A8R(32)-MVP users would have been (for lack of a better term) screwed.
It's a real tribute to ATI that unlike many hardware companies, they closely monitor forums and work honestly and openly to address problems. If only all hardware venders had this kind of concern us end-users would be in a much better situation.
I think competition can sometimes bring out the best in companies and I hope DFI, Gigabyte/MSI, A-Bit have monitored the Asus situations and are preparing to capitalize on these mis-steps. I do wish there was a more constructive way to post these frustating series of events in relation to Asus - but honestly there's just no way. Everyone makes mistakes and nothing can be perfect, but it's obvious the last 6 months of Asus mobo releases does not fall in the "accidents happen" category. I'll be re-posting this note in all the relevant threads."
....hmm.... don't know if this is still a current issue....?