Review: Calling all audiophiles, gamers, and pro-overclockers - well, maybe not the last one, but the Rampage III Black is great for everyone else.
Intel's upmarket X58 platform may be getting long in the tooth, but you wouldn't know it with all the fancy boards being thrown at us of late. ASUS’ latest offering, the Rampage III Black Edition ROG board, is targeted at hybrid gamer/audiophile/professional-overclocker/wealthy types. Yep, all two of you! Jokes aside, this latest offering is as fancy as they come, with more features than a Swiss Army knife on crack.
The 'OC Zone' is what attracts us to this particular calibre of motherboard. Switches to turn off individual PCI-e 16x buses provide a handy method of debugging error-prone multi-GPU setups, while the debug display assists troubleshooting faults caused by overclocking efforts. A small set of circuit nodes named 'ProbeIt' are supplied to manually measure the numerous voltages associated with a successful overclock, including vCore and CPU PLL. An 'LN2 Mode' switch treats the causes of the infamous 'cold bug' which most CPUs suffer from under extreme cooling. There's also the ever handy power/reset buttons.
The X58 chipset provides 36 lanes of PCI-e 2.0 bandwidth, and as such, this board can run quad SLI/Crossfire in an 8x/8x/8x/8x configuration. Naturally, running a single or dual card configuration will use the full 16x slot capability on each.
Audio has become a big selling point, so what better way to out-do your opposition than provide two audio solutions! The first is an onboard SupremeFX X-Fi 2, which is nothing fancy, but a definite step-up from your typical Realtek chip. However, why settle for better when you can get the best? ASUS has bundled a PCI-e add-on card, the 'ThunderBolt'. This card is no gimmick; it features an ASUS AV100 audio chipset, the same found on their Xonar and Essence range of audio equipment. This can emulate EAX and a multitude of Dolby technologies, while providing a very clean 116db SNR (sound to noise ratio). The connectivity is limited to line in, and an amplified line out, via 3.5mm TRS connectors. It's got a Gigabit LAN port too, connected to a Bigfoot Killer E2100 chip.
Connectivity on the Rampage III Black Edition is adequate, providing seven USB2.0, two USB3.0, a combined PS/2 port, 8-channel audio connections (utilising the SupremeFX X-Fi 2), two eSATA ports and an Intel Gigabit port.
The bundle of kit provided with the Rampage is second to none. Two Wi-Fi antenna are part of the package (which connect via the I/O panel), a 3-way SLI bridge, an SLI cable, CrossFire cable, Q-Connector, three thermal sensor probes, Northbridge fan, an array of SATA cables (including cable ties), ROG connect cable, a large ROG sticker, and a few other goodies.
Even with all these bits and pieces, performance is where it all counts. The Rampage is a complex beast. You won't see EFI on this board, it's old school BIOS all the way.
Our 990X was conscripted to test the board. We started with LLC off, and set the voltage to 1.481v in the BIOS. We settled with 133 x 35 as our configuration, netting us 4.66GHz. Upon entering Windows and firing up CPU-z, we were greeted with 1.472v idle (a small vDrop) and 1.416v load. The vDroop was high, but expected. Enabling 50 per cent LLC raised the voltage to 1.456v under load, and 100 per cent overshot the mark slightly at 1.496v.
Although we managed to get 4.66GHz stable at this voltage, we struggled to get the CPU stable at our known working limit of 4.8GHz using our previously successful overclock strategy. We're certain the motherboard can push the processor further, however the sheer array of options often makes the process difficult by introducing an extra level of variables to consider. This motherboard is definitely aimed at the extreme tinkerer.
Although we didn't hit our 4.8GHz goal set on the G1.Assassin, we did test at 4GHz to do a direct comparison. PiFast, single-thread wPrime, Cinebench, and Everest tests all performed better on the Rampage.
We really like the high quality external sound solution, the onboard enthusiast features, and the overall quality of this motherboard. The price is disheartening, but if you're looking to purchase Wi-Fi/Bluetooth, external audio, and Killer NIC separately, you may find this quite a good deal. We're still unsure of the mash-up of overclocker/gamer markets, but nonetheless, we're quite impressed with the feature set of the Rampage.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012