ASUS Rampage Extreme Motherboard

 

To ensure that all reviews on Overclock3D are fair, consistent and unbiased, a standard set of hardware and software is used whenever possible during the comparative testing of two or more products. The configuration used in this review can be seen below:

 

 

During the testing of the setup above, special care was taken to ensure that the BIOS settings used matched whenever possible. A fresh install of Windows Vista was also used before the benchmarking began, with a full defrag of the hard drive once all the drivers and software were installed, preventing any possible performance issues due to leftover drivers from the previous motherboard installations.

For the 3DMark and gaming tests a single card configuration was used.

To guarantee a broad range of results, the following benchmark utilities were used:

 

 

 

 

With so many options available, moderate overclocks were easily gained through the AUTO options and Level up configurations. Better overclocks were accomplished tweaking the Vcore/NB/VTT voltages.

 

 

You can see from the included CPU-Z screenshots (above) that the ASUS Rampage Extreme managed to extract just shy of 2000MHz out of my Q6600. This isn’t too bad considering that most Quad’s will top out around 500 FSB, and is no way a bad reflection on the motherboard – it’s an overclocking beast.

 

Increasing the multiplyer to 9 the ASUS Rampage Extreme managed to take my Q6600 processor to over 3.8GHz. The process of overclocking on the board was a pleasure too, with very little adjustments outside of the usual FSB, Vcore and Memory needing to be made. The BIOS also felt extremely mature and recovered extraordinarily well from failed overclock settings.

 

During the benchmarking phase of the ASUS Rampage Extreme our Q6600 ‘G0’ stepping processor will be clocked to 3.6GHz to prevent any bottlenecking.

 

 

On to the benchmarks…