ASUS Rampage II Extreme X58 Motherboard Review

System Benchmarks

SuperPi Mod v1.5

When running the SuperPI 32MB benchmark, we are calculating Pi to 32 million digits and timing the process. Obviously more CPU power helps in this intense calculation, but the memory sub-system also plays an important role, as does the operating system.



The increased CPU, Uncore and QPI clocks really have an opportunity to shine in SuperPI, reducing the overall time by over 2 minutes. The results demonstrate a huge 23% improvement in a benchmark in which mere tenths of a second matter.


PCMark Vantage x64

The latest iteration of the popular system benchmark is PCMark Vantage from the Futuremark crew. The PCMark series has always been a great way to either test specific areas of a system or to get a general overview of how your system is performing. For our results, we simply run the basic benchmark suite which consists of a wide range of tests involving all the sub-systems of the computer.



PCMark Vantage is focused on real-world performance as it tests all critical sub-systems and seeing a 9% gain here is very respectable.


Cinebench R10

Developed by MAXON, creators of Cinema 4D, Cinebench 10 is designed using the popular Cinema software and created to compare system performance in 3D Animation and Photo applications. There are two parts to the test; the first stresses only the primary CPU or Core, the second, makes use of up to 16 CPUs/Cores. Both are done rendering a realistic photo while utilizing various CPU-intensive features such as reflection, ambient occlusion, area lights and procedural shaders.



Cinebench is an effective way of testing pure processing power, and the ~24% performance improvements demonstrate almost perfect scaling with the increase in CPU clocks (25%).


DivX Converter v6

Now that we have ran some of the more 'synthetic' benchmarks, it is time for a real-life VOB to DivX encoding task. We will take a 1.08GB VOB rip of the cult-classic movie Full Metal Jacket and convert it into DivX using the default multi-media setting of DivX converter v6. DivX fully utilizes all cores of the processor and will rely heavily on all aspects of the system for performance.



Even with the advent of multi-core processors, video conversion is still one of the most time consuming endeavour that PC users are face with. Thankfully, the Core i7's remarkable multi-threaded performance has certainly helped to accelerate this task. The overclocked configuration was able to shave over 3 minutes off a 24 minute task, a tangible improvement.


Lame Front End

Unlike the DivX conversion program we just looked at, Lame Front End is not multi-threaded and only utilizes a single processor core. This will obviously limit performance but we should still achieve significant time savings going from the stock to the overclocked settings. We will be encoding a WAV rip of Santana’s Supernatural album and converting it to MP3 using the VBR 0 quality preset.



Our overclocked Core i7 is able to rip and convert an entire CD album to high-quality MP3s in just over 2 minutes, which is almost 23% faster than the stock configuration.


Photoshop CS3

For the image editing portion of this review, we will use Photoshop CS3 in coordination with our very own HWC Speed Test, which is an excellent measure of CPU power and memory bandwidth. This is a scripted benchmark that individually applies 12 different actions and filters to a 3.72MB JPEG, and uses Photoshop’s built-in timing feature to provide a result at each test stage. Then it’s simply a matter of adding up the 12 results to reach a final figure.


A 22% - 9 second improvement between stock and overclocked configurations is definitely noteworthy, and it might motivate image-editing enthusiasts to overclock their Core i7 systems.


WinRAR 3.7.1

The last of our real-life tests will be with the highly popular & multi-threaded WinRAR 3.71 tool, in which we take a 1GB batch of assorted files and archive them, timing the task until completion.



Along with being the first application that we install on a fresh Windows installation, WinRAR is a tool that we use countless times per day, so any performance improvement can provide some welcome time savings. With the overclocked setup, the compression test completed an impressive 29% faster than at stock. Interestingly, this improvement is greater than our 25% CPU overclock, so clearly the faster Uncore or QPI speeds must be playing a slight role in this benchmark.