ASUS Rampage II Extreme X58 Motherboard Review

Gaming Benchmarks

Futuremark 3DMark 06

The Futuremark 3DMark series has been a part of the backbone in computer and hardware reviews since its conception. The trend continues today as 3DMark06 provides consumers with a solid synthetic benchmark geared for performance and comparison in the 3D gaming realm. This remains one of the most sought after statistics, as well as an excellent tool for accurate CPU comparison. We will continue to include the venerable 3DMark 06 because it is less GPU bound than Vantage, and thus a better indicator of overall system performance.



Despite the impressive 20% increase in the CPU score, the overall score increases by only 5%, which suggests that our GeForce 9800GTX is bottlenecking the overclocked Core i7 system.


Futuremark 3DMark Vantage

You asked for it, so we have finally included 3DMark Vantage, Futuremark’s latest release in their renowned line of 3D benchmarking software. This latest DX10-only 3DMark comes with a variety of presets, but for our tests will be use the standard Performance preset which is suitable for a much greater range of system specifications than the other more demanding presets.


In 3DMark Vantage, the CPU score scales almost perfectly with the increase in CPU frequency. However, this certainly does not translate into a dramatically higher overall performance, as the full scores increases by a miniscule 1.4%. Once again our GeForce 9800GTX is revealed to be a major bottleneck in this graphics-intensive benchmark.

Let's see what we can expect in actual games.


Crysis

While Crysis is intensely GPU dependent, we added it to our gaming benchmarks to see how system changes can improve in-game performance on a Core i7 system. We utilized the Sphere level demo in 64-bit DX10 mode with a resolution of 1680x1050 and with all detail levels set to medium.


As we have come to expect from Crysis additional processing power simply does not translate into improved overall performance, it remains an intensely GPU-limited game.


Far Cry 2

Far Cry 2 is the hot new new first-person shooter from Ubisoft's Montreal studio, and the first game to utilize the new visually stunning Dunia Engine, which will undoubtedly be used by numerous future games. Using the provided Benchmarking Tool, we ran the Ranch Small demo in DX10 mode at 1680x1050 with all settings set to high.


As we saw in Crysis, the increased system clocks simply do not translate into noteworthy performance improvements due to the graphics bottleneck.


Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts

This test consists of actual gameplay using a single mission (Authie: Boudica's Boys from the British Campaign) since it holds a bit of everything the game has to offer: vehicle battles, artillery barrages and house-to-house fighting. We recorded framerates using FRAPS up until the 15 minute mark of the mission and excluding any in-game briefings / cutscenes. The game was run in DirectX 9 mode at 1680x1050 with all detail levels set to high.


Finally, in COH: OP the increased system clocks do provide a decent 10% performance boost over the stock configuration. This real-time strategy (RTS) game used to bring systems to their knees, but our Core i7/GeForce 9800GTX combo is more than capable of running it at a healthy pace, even with all settings maxed out.


Team Fortress 2

As our last gaming benchmark, we will use the addictive and CPU-intensive Team Fortress 2. For this test, we made an action-packed 30-minute timedemo on the “2_Fort” map with a constant 20-24 player load. This test represents a worst-case scenario because it is a small map with a high number of players on the screen at all times, placing a significant load on the CPU. The resolution was set to 1680x1050 with all settings on high.


Team Fortress 2 is well-known for having excellent CPU scalability, and because of this we were surprised to "only" see a 12% frame rate improvement. This suggests that once again our GeForce 9800GTX is proving to be a performance bottleneck.