ASUS Rampage Formula

Josh Collins watches as ASUS rinses and repeats.

Rampaging or hemorrhaging? That’s what we’re wondering about ASUS’ current motherboard lineup and the focus isn’t just shining, but beaming down on this Rampage Formula for both good and bad reasons.

Back in issue 83 we took a gander at the Maximus Formula. At the time the X38 chipset had just dropped on the scene and with it dual 16x electrical PCI-express slots. This was, ultimately, the board’s main saving grace.

The Maximus Formula was slower than its P35-based Blitz Formula stablemate and during our testing exhibited some memory efficiency issues, while also demonstrating why the X38 chipset is more appropriately engineered and tuned for use with DDR3 memory.

So what’s with this history lesson? The review is meant to be on the Rampage Formula, right?

Indeed it is, but there’s a good reason for background. This is not only the fact that X38 and X48 are near identical, with the exception of some additional speed binning at Intel’s end, but also that the Rampage Formula is nothing new. That’s right; we’ve seen this board before.

The old saying “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is a great one. But by the same token, and for the love of technology progression, please ASUS, don’t just re-release an old product with a new name!

If you’ve got a copy of issue 83 in your collection, do yourself a favour and go grab it and open to page 55. Furthermore, and for those of you that don’t have a copy of issue 83 on hand, click your way through to the product pages for the Rampage Formula and Maximus Formula on the ASUS website. Look closely – real closely.

The boards are about as identical as a supposedly different series can be. Same socket layout, same expansion slot layout, same I/O

ports and layout… heck, everything is like a mirror image but with a different colour in some places – how original.

We wish we could stop here, but now click on through the ASUS website to the entry level X38-based P5E. Now look closely at all the boards. Yup, it’s the same; only a few physical parts such as fan headers haven’t been soldered onto the board.

Now comes the real kicker – you might want to gather with fellow geeks for either an over the top laugh or some mass rioting – the P5E can be flashed to a Maximus Formula and obtain all the BIOS features bar a few minor ones. The same features you pay through the roof for. Not content with that? Well why don’t you then flash your Maximus Formula or your already flashed P5E to the Rampage Formula? Because guess what everyone, that’s doable as well!

This is quite possibly the biggest demonstration of why excessively streamlined product differentiation and engineering can lead to a rather red face for the manufacturer in the eye of the consumer. This, enthusiast brothers and sisters, is a poor example of rinse and repeat.

But enough harping on about how the boards are physically the same; what you undoubtedly want to know is whether they perform the same.

Annoyingly, the answer is ‘more or less’.

You see, you’ll get more in that the Rampage Formula motherboard/BIOS that we tested is overall faster than the results obtained for the Maximus Formula back in issue 83 – if only ever so slightly. But, if logic persists, this can be directly attributed to the now mature BIOS of the Maximus Formula and the R&D put into it prior to the release of the Rampage Formula. So, it must be asked; was any work really done to improve the Rampage Formula over the Maximus Formula? Or did it simply inherit already working and tweaked performance due to the 99.9 per cent similar characteristics?

Either way, we aren’t entirely impressed. Sure, there’s the fact the two boards are near identical and within 10-20 bucks of one another in the market. Sure, with three boards share such similar traits, you’d be wondering why you’d bother buying the top-of-the-line when you can get the same performance by BIOS flashing a $100 cheaper board. But our biggest gripe is that even with all of this stream-lining; there are still a number of things that ASUS has managed to bugger up.

As mentioned already, the memory performance on the Maximus Formula left quite a bit to be desired. And desire we shall continue to. For this board has much the same inefficient handling of memory as its predecessor.

The past simple rule was that for best performance, DDR2 made its home with P35 and DDR3 mated with X38. With X38 and X48 being technically identical, there’s no surprise that the DDR2 performance on the Rampage Formula leaves much to be desired, even when compared to the much older Blitz Formula based on P35.

One of the staggeringly obvious memory screw ups is with the efficiency of the 4:5 divider used during our testing with an FSB frequency of 400MHz. To be brutally honest, the 4:5 divider is an absolute dog and gets slaughtered like one by the efficiency of the 2:3 divider used during the 333MHz FSB testing.

The memory’s got issues but at least we can do FSB comparisons while maintaining a given end frequency… or so we thought.

We wanted to do tests at 462MHz FSB with a 6.5x multiplier but, behold, just like its predecessors, the Rampage Formula’s 6.5x multiplier simply doesn’t work and defaults back to 6x.

But that’s not the only thing broken in the BIOS.

As enthusiasts, we see memory as a key part in assuring the overall efficiency of our systems. That said, it comes as know surprise that we naturally prefer to run 1T command rate on the memory rather than a 2T command rate. Or at the very least have the option to do so.

On the Rampage Formula we do get the option between 1T and 2T command rates, but the problem is that it doesn’t stick. You can you can happily set a 1T command rate in the BIOS, but what you end up with is 2T upon rebooting and entering the BIOS a second time.

While the board has its drawbacks in the memory department, it does manage to do at least something right.

Back when we looked at the Maximus Formula we were testing with Core 2 Duos rather than Core 2 Quads, as we currently do. Nonetheless, it’s much easier to get high FSB frequencies on a dual core than on a quad core, naturally. And in this light, the Maximus Formula didn’t pull too well in hitting high FSB frequencies with the Core 2 Duos.

Thankfully, of all the pages in the book not to pay attention to, the Rampage Formula chose the FSB overclocking page. And while overclocking quad cores is more difficult, the Rampage Formula still managed a very respectable 480MHz FSB max and 475MHz benchable. That’s not far off the superior FSB overclocking of the 790i chipset and is a fair effort for an X48 based board. Not only that, the Maximus Formula only managed 520MHz FSB and that was only with a dual core.

If you must have this board, so be it, but ultimately for the money spent there are simply better offerings on the table.