Asus Rampage II Extreme

Manufacturer:
Price:	£350 inc VAT
Reviewer:	Mark Mackay
Review Date:	Feb 2009
Speed	39/45	87%
Features	29/30	97%
Value	16/25	64%
Overall	84%

Verdict: More features than a year's worth of Custom PC issues.

The Rampage II Extreme is a sexy-looking motherboard. Red, black and dark metallic grey cooling hardware cover a significant portion of the slightly larger than ATX-sized board (it measures 305mm x 270mm, but will fit in most cases). Complementing the extensive cooling hardware is a host of overclocking features. Asus describes the Rampage II Extreme as the pinnacle of its Republic of Gamer series, and we can see why.

To kick off the novel overclocking features of the board, to one side of the X58 chipset is a raised mini PCB covered by a small heatsink and backlit Republic of Gamers logo. This arrangement - which vaguely resembles an old oriental building used for making Samurai swords - comprises Asus' new VTT CPU Power Board. The little PCB houses several chips, which Asus claims provide additional power phases to the CPU, QPI, chipset and memory. Additional phases mean that the VRMs for each component can provide more stable voltages to these components at any given level of power delivery, potentially improving stability when overclocking.

The TweakIt system, which was first seen on the original Rampage Extreme, is also present. Three buttons on the PCB work in conjunction with a small LED display, allowing you to navigate the BIOS and adjust overclocks on the fly. This is only useful for huge overclocks, where CPU speeds in excess of 5GHz can prevent Windows from booting. Overclockers will therefore often set a CPU to run at a mere 4.5GHz or so, boot into Windows and then push for yet higher operational maximums.

As you'll probably use liquid nitrogen for massive overclocks, time is crucial, as the LN2 will quickly boil into its gaseous form and it's hardly cheap. Messing around with flaky overclocking software is not only annoying for the liquid nitrogen cooler, but it's also costly, which is why the TweakIt system could prove useful. Unfortunately, the LED poster of our test rig didn't work, so we were unable to test it. Asus tells us that this is due to an early BIOS revision and Corei7 being such a new technology.

Asus has taken the TweakIt system a step further than the original Rampage Extreme and added voltage measuring points, which it calls Probelt. This allows you to measure the true voltage reaching each component, including the CPU, DRAM, X58 chip and Southbridge. The packaging includes two small probe attachments for a multimeter.

Testing Probelt was fairly easy, as attaching a multimeter to the two probe inputs is simple. Comparing the voltages on the multimeter to those of the BIOS confirmed that the voltage reporting of the BIOS is mostly accurate. We saw little sign of vdrop, and the only voltage that showed any vdroop was the QPI/DRAM voltage, which showed as 1.41V instead of 1.45V.

Power and reset switches, a working clear CMOS button on the back I/O block and a secondary BIOS chip - selectable by a small jumper on the PCB - complete the Rampage II Extreme's impressive arsenal of overclocking weaponry.

The board will run both SLI and CrossFire multigraphics setups, providing 16 lanes of PCI-E 2.0 bandwidth to your primary and secondary cards, while a third card will receive just eight lanes. Further expansion slots are a little sparse, with just one 1x PCI-E and one regular PCI slot. A dual-slot graphics card in the primary slot will obstruct the 1x PCI-E slot and a dual-slot graphics card in the secondary slot will obstruct one PCI slot. There's one more expansion slot that appears to be a 1x PCI-E slot, but is in fact only compatible with the bundled sound card. The RoG-branded SupremeFX sound card is X-Fi-compatible and provides 7.1 surround sound. The card also has both optical and coaxial S/PDIF out.

The Rampage II Extreme is fitted with EIDE and floppy connectors, two USB 2 headers, one FireWire header, seven S-ATA II ports and no fewer than seven additional fan headers. The back I/O block houses four USB 2 ports, two Gigabit LAN ports, one FireWire, one eSATA and one PS/2 port that can accept either a mouse or keyboard.

Performance

The Rampage II Extreme was the fastest out-of-the-box performer of all the Core i7 motherboards we've seen, although only fractionally. Scores of 1,221 in image editing and 2,255 in video encoding contributed to an overall score of 1,572. The board also ran Crysis faster than any other board with our Zotac GeForce GTX 260 AMP! - its minimum of 36fps is 2fps faster than any other score so far.

Like the original Rampage Extreme, the BIOS starts with the 'Extreme Tweaker' tab instead of the more common 'Main' tab. There are eight overclocking profile slots, which further helps to save time when tinkering. The CPU and memory speed are clearly labelled right at the top of the screen, so you can immediately see your target frequencies. Also clearly labelled are the actual voltages running through the components, as well as what the voltages are set to, so there's no need to check the Hardware Monitor screen.

As the rather more sedate Asus P6T Deluxe overclocked our 2.66GHz Core i7-920 to 4GHz without any problems, this is where we started testing. It was no surprise that similar voltages to the P6T Deluxe were required to make the overclock stable. We raised the vcore to 1.475V, the IOC and ICH to 1.312V, and the QPI/DRAM voltage to 1.45V to achieve the overclock. We spent a lot of time trying to benchmark the Rampage II Extreme beyond 4GHz, but after days of tinkering with the myriad BIOS settings, we couldn't stably push the CPU beyond 4GHz.

The overclocked rig produced similar scores to those of the MSI Eclipse and the Asus P6T Deluxe. However, the P6T Deluxe was the most successful board in our Media Benchmarks, as it scored 2,294 when running our Core i7-920 at 4GHz, while the MSI Eclipse managed an overall score of 2,258, despite running the same CPU at 4.1GHz. The Rampage II Extreme was only a few points behind with 2,243 overall with the Core i7 overclocked to 4GHz. With this overclock applied, Crysis saw a 6fps increase in the minimum frame rate from stock speed. Its speeds of 42fps minimum and 47fps average are the fastest we've seen so far.

We dropped the multiplier to 12 to test for a maximum QPI. With a little extra QPI/DRAM voltage, the QPI ran stably at 220MHz, the highest we've seen from any Core i7 motherboard so far.

Conclusion

Reviewing the Rampage II Extreme in our lab is a little like trying to study the habits of wild animals when they're in a cage.

This motherboard would undoubtedly be most at home on a bench, with an LN2 pot bolted on and surrounded by mad scientists. It has more overclocking features than any motherboard we've seen, although these extras also make this board the most expensive single-socket motherboard we've tested. Motherboards such as the MSI Eclipse and Asus P6T Deluxe are better suited to everyday use, with their higher number of expansion slots and lower price.

Meanwhile, the Rampage II Extreme looks set to become an overclocking superstar, breaking benchmark record after benchmark record.