Legit Motherboard Reviews
ASUS Rampage III Extreme Intel X58 Motherboard Review
| Manufacturer: | ASUS |
| Product: | ASUS Rampage III Extreme |
| Date: | Wed, Sep 08, 2010 - 12:00 AM |
| Written By: | Chris Morrell - |
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Supplementary Software
The latest rage from motherboard and videocard vendors has been bundled software. I'm not talking freebie video games, I'm talking those dozen or so utilities that seem to be bundled with everything these days. In my opinion the vast majority of them are completely useless but two applications for the ASUS Rampage III Extreme, ROG Connect and TurboV, are actually immensely useful.
Gigabyte, take note. TurboV is both incredibly useful and very smooth. It fires up quickly, it engages settings swiftly, and what I imagine is an accidental but useful feature is that it'll typically crash when you apply a setting that will likely BSOD your rig in a few seconds. While benching MaxxMEM I can't count the number of times TurboV would BSOD and then the system would BSOD 15-30 seconds later. Besides being an excellent canary in the coalmine of overclocking TurboV does a great job of adjusting system voltages and frequencies. Just remember if you plan on feeding excessive voltages to set the extreme OV setting in the BIOS.
In most instances adjusting the CPU ratio won't be that useful. However, with an extreme edition processor this can be a huge boon. Bumping bclk too high from the boot setting can yield instability due to things like pushing the memory and uncore too hard. You solve this by simply lowering bclk and bumping up the CPU ratio. Great stuff here; used it many times in conjunction with ROG Connect.
Unlike TurboV which is run on the target system, ROG Connect is run on a separate computer and a USB cable links the controlling computer with the target computer. This lets the overclocker adjust settings prior to booting windows and during benchmark runs. When you are riding that thin line between a crash and a successful run it helps having the ability to tweak voltages and frequencies between separate phases of a benchmark. A great example is dropping the CPU frequency during the CPU tests of 3DMark 2006 and Vantage. This lets you run the 3D portions at your normal 3D clocks and then drop down to safe speeds to keep the CPU from crashing the CPU test.
When I benchmark with my cascade I positively love RC Poster and RC Remote. I sit pretty far away from the system as it is on a dedicated cart and with RC Remote I can remotely power on and power off the system and with RC Poster I can watch the POST codes to see what is causing the board to not boot.
RC Diagram isn't too useful outside when actually benchmarking but it does generate very pretty graphs of anything that can be monitored with ROG Connect. I prefer the default amp draw and voltage draw as it gives me a good idea of the load on the CPU. The above image was just a wPrime 32M run at stock speeds and voltages. I believe it jumps to 1.20vcpu and pulls just under 100 amps to yield around 120w pulled from the socket.
Next Page - Creative R3E Conclusion
| Review Index |
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Page 1 - Rampaging Red REX Runs Rampant
Page 2 - Alluring Accessories Page 3 - Bloody Beautiful Board Bitmaps Page 4 - Bashful BIOS Page 5 - Air Aerated Assembly Page 6 - Air Aerated Aftermath Page 7 - Cryogenically Cooled Creature Page 8 - Cryogenically Cooled Conquest Page 9 - Maximizing Memory Page 10 - Supplementary Software Page 11 - Creative R3E Conclusion |
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