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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Air Aerated Aftermath

Since this was my last review and all I decided I'd rather have a bit of fun. Futuremark's 3DMark series may not be the most accurate representation of past, current, and future rendering technologies but it currently is a default testing suite. When you loop 3DMark benchmarks as often as I have they seem to go hand in hand with overclocking so that's naturally what I gravitated towards. For the air-cooled section I opted for 3DMark 2003, 3DMark 2005, 3DMark 2006, and 3DMark Vantage. This lineup of benchmarks covers a variety of portions of the system with 2003 primarily GPU bound, 2005 primarily CPU bound, 2006 heavily CPU dependent, moderately GPU dependent, and Vantage heavily CPU dependent with a slight CPU requirement.

To kick things off I ran through the suite of benchmarks with the CPU and GPU at stock speeds. This left the GPU at 701MHz core, 1401MHz shader, and 924MHz memory. The CPU was run at 25x143MHz to yield 3587MHz on the core, 3157MHz on the uncore, and 1004MHz 7-8-7-20 on the memory. This was a compromise in order to run the Corsair Dominator GT 2000C7 kit at stock while keeping the CPU close to the frequency typically achieved under turbo mode.

Rampage III Extreme and EVGA GTX 480 3DMark 2003 stock clocks 90185 3DMarks    Rampage III Extreme and EVGA GTX 480 3DMark 2005 stock clocks 31253 3DMarks

Rampage III Extreme and EVGA GTX 480 3DMark 2006 stock clocks 24685 3DMarks     Rampage III Extreme and EVGA GTX 480 3DMark Vantage stock clocks P21063 3DMarks

Click the images to see the full-sized screenshot.

All across the line the numbers aren't too bad. Compared to where I was struggling to hit 20k in 3D06 or 70k in 3D03 back when Core 2 launched it is just silly how powerful these components are at stock components. Stock clocks are boring though, so next up I pushed the CPU to my conservative limits on air. Due to this CPU being a rather nice CPU under LN2 I took it easy on the voltages. My limit was 1.40vcpu, 1.30vtt, and CPU PLL was set to 1.57v. This, combined with the air cooling, limited 3DMark 2006 CPU test stability to 4460MHz so the entire suite was re-run with the CPU at 4460MHz with the uncore at 3773MHz.

Rampage III Extreme and EVGA GTX 480 3DMark 2003 OC CPU Stock GPU 95362 3DMarks   Rampage III Extreme and EVGA GTX 480 3DMark 2005 OC CPU Stock GPU 38623 3DMarks

Rampage III Extreme and EVGA GTX 480 3DMark 2006 OC CPU Stock GPU 29227 3DMarks     Rampage III Extreme and EVGA GTX 480 3DMark Vantage OC CPU Stock GPU P20966 3DMarks

Click the images to see the full-sized screenshot.

Comparing the benchmarks 2003 gets a modest bump from the CPU speed upgrade, 2005 scales wildly as expected, 2006 scales in both the CPU and GPU segments, and oddly Vantage flatlines. The lack of GPU scaling isn't surprising, GPU scores in this benchmark are hardly affected by CPU frequency, but the actual drop in CPU score by increase CPU frequency by 1GHz was interesting. Naturally I only noticed this after the fact but it'll be something worth attempting to reproduce.

Next up I pushed the GPU to the limits that the poor stock cooler was able to achieve. Setting 1.075vGPU via MSI's AfterBurner I was able to consistently run 850MHz core, 1700MHz shader and a conservative 1000MHz memory. 3DMark Vantage required a drop in core frequencies as only 825MHz core, 1650MHz shader and 1000MHz memory were capable of passing consistently.

Rampage III Extreme and EVGA GTX 480 3DMark 2003 OC CPU OC GPU 107061 3DMarks    Rampage III Extreme and EVGA GTX 480 3DMark 2005 OC CPU OC GPU 38997 3DMarks

Rampage III Extreme and EVGA GTX 480 3DMark 2006 OC CPU OC GPU 30145 3DMarks    Rampage III Extreme and EVGA GTX 480 3DMark Vantage OC CPU OC GPU P24092 3DMarks

Click the images to see the full-sized screenshot.

Comparing across the three separate tiers we now have seen some interesting scaling. 3DMark 2003, being such a GPU intensive benchmark, jumps another 12k points from the OC'd CPU and a full 17k points from the stock runs. 3DMark 2005, being very CPU frequency limited, hardly scales from the OC'd CPU scores but in the end yielding an increase of nearly 8k points from the stock runs. 3DMark 2006 SM3 score gained another 1k points yielding a healthy 900 point jump in the final score. 3DMark Vantage was the real winner, though. It had a full 3k jump in points primarily due to the GPU score jumping 3k points. Notice also what I'd consider a more appropriate CPU score although it still feels low. Now onwards to the liquid nitrogen cooled runs!

Next Page - Cryogenically Cooled Creature


Review Index
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