ASUS Rampage II Extreme X58 Motherboard Review

Feature Testing: TweakIt

A carry over from the Rampage Extreme, the TweakIt controls are arguably the greatest differentiating factor between the RIIE and every other X58 motherboard on the market. With the assistance of the LCD Poster, this innovative feature allows for total control over system frequency and voltages in order to facilitate overclocking at any time. In or out of Windows, even while gaming, you can now overclock your system as necessary. TweakIt also allows users the ability to monitor voltages, temperatures and fan speeds without the need for any special software. Lastly, it gives you control over BIOS boot selection and the BIOS backup feature.

As you can see there are five main buttons, and their functions are fairly simple:

• Toggle: Press to go back to the previous option.
• Confirm: Press to enter an option or confirm your settings.
• Select: Joystick left (previous; decrease) / right (next; increase) to select an option or adjust value.
• Reset: Reset/Reboot the system.
• Start: Start/Shutdown system.

The interface is quite intuitive, and within a few minutes of toggling most people will have no problems navigating the available menus. On that note, here is a table of what can be controlled and monitored with this unique feature.

Main Section	Level 1	Level 2
	1 VOLT 2 TEMP 3 FAN 4 FREQ	1 VOLT 0 All 1 CPU 2 QPI 3 CPUPLL 4 DRAM 5 IOH 1_5V 6 IOH 7 ICH 1_5 8 ICH 2 TEMP 0 All 1 CPU 2 NB 3 SB 4 MB 5 OPT_1 6 OPT_2 7 OPT_3 3 FAN 0 All 1 CPUFAN 2 PWRFAN 3 OPT_1 4 OPT_2 5 OPT_3 6 CHA_1 7 CHA_2 8 CHA_3 4 FREQ BLCK
	1 CPU 2 QPI 3 CPUPLL 4 DRAM 5 IOH 1_5 6 IOH 7 ICH 1_5 8 ICH	Full voltage range that is available in BIOS is available for all voltage options through TweakIt
	1 BCLK 2 RATIO	Full BCLK & ratio range that is available in BIOS is available through TweakIt
	1 BOOT	BIOS 1 BIOS 2

While the HWINFO menu is the most impressive due to the massive number of system readouts, the DYNAOV menu is what we appreciated the most. This menu allowed us to dynamically alter all essential system voltages without having to reboot the system, and without having to rely on finnicky software. As a whole, TweakIt is a joy to use and it should become a hit among avid overclockers. Even those who don't overclock will enjoy pushing the race car-like START button. Having said that, this feature is really only usable by those who run their systems on a tech station. Those who plan on installing this motherboard in a traditional case will likely find TweakIt to be a cool novelty feature, but one that is difficult to use on a frequent basis. Therefore, we really would like to see a second pair of TweakIt controls integrated into an external module with a built-in LCD display...kind of like a fancy gaming pad, but for overclocking. How about it ASUS?


Next up let's have a look at the ProbeIt feature in the Voltage Regulation section.