ASUS Rampage II Gene mATX LGA1366 Motherboard Review

System Benchmarks

When running the 32M benchmark of SPi, 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. SPi 32M has been a favorite amongst benchmarks for these very reasons and is admittedly the favorite benchmark of this reviewer.

We like to think of SuperPi 32M as a synthetic benchmark so we group it in with the other synthetic benches but it really does indicate a good bit about system performance, particularly memory sub-system performance. Obviously this isn't a fair comparison between these two system but the overclocked result really is impressive coming in under 9 minutes without any tweaks or optimizations. Not to mention being ran in Vista.

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 over view of how your system is performing. For our results, we simply run the basic benchmark suite which involves a wide range of tests on all of the sub-systems of the computer.

Another synthetic benchmark, PCMark Vantage tests overall system performance by calculating a total score from a bunch of separate benchmarks of the sub-systems. Normally we see pretty close numbers but with such a discrepancy between system clocks, the PCMark results are a solid 1300 points apart. Again, another very compelling argument to overclock a system as performance increases substantially.

Another benchmarking community favorite, Cinebench renders an intense 2D scene relying on all the processing power it can. Cinebench R10 is another 64-bit capable application and is likely the most efficient program tested today at utilizing all cores of a processor. We will be running both the single threaded and multi-threaded benches here today.

Cinebench is almost all CPU power dependent for its results. This equates to linear scaling in performance as processor power goes up. The result is a very large performance increase going from 3.2GHz to 4.1GHz, as one would expect.

Next up is a real life benchmark where we simply time a common task done on the computer. Encoding DVDs for viewing on the computer or other devices is an increasingly important task that the personal computer has taken on. We will take a VOB rip of the movie Office Space, and convert it into DivX using the default 720P setting of DivX converter v6.8.

We are now getting into the real world benchmarks and going to see how the overclocked setup can really decrease processing time for a lot of common tasks. The DivX conversion of taking VOB files from a DVD and converting them to a 720p DivX movie takes a solid five minutes less on the overclocked system compared to the stock setup. This is a substantial savings of processing time when we consider the process takes only 20 minutes or so. We are looking at more than a 25% increase in processing speed for this particular task.

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

Like the DivX results, despite being only a single threaded application, the LAME conversion is cut by over 25% with the overclock we were able to achieve on the Rampage II Gene. If time is money, then overclocking ability is definitely worth it with the Gene. We are still pretty impressed that the 4.1GHz clock has held up on this motherboard because running an i7 with Hyper Threading enabled at 4.1GHz is not something to take lightly. This little board is definitely worth a look whether you need m-ATX or not.

Adobe Photoshop CS4 is fully x64 compliant and ready and able to use every single CPU cycle our processor has available including the implementation of GPU support utilizing the GTX 280 in our test system. It is just a shame it can't fully utilize all 8 threads of the i7 processor yet. We have changed our Photoshop benchmark to more of a standardized test configured by DriverHeaven.net. Their Photoshop benchmark utilizes 15 filters and effects on an uncompressed 109MB .JPG image that will test not only the CPU but also the memory subsystem of our test bench. Each portion of the benchmark is timed and added together for a final time that is compared below.

The greater than 25% increase in performance continues right through the real world testing as Photoshop also took over 25% of the time off the DriverHeaven V3 benchmark. So despite the synthetic benchmark Cinebench showing less than a 25% increase in processing power, the real world benchmarks have all been over 25% in their gains. This just goes to show that the memory overclock and uncore overclock are clearly having an effect on performance. The CPU overclock is the primary reason for the better performance but all components play a role.

We all know what WinRAR is and does. It is a compression and decompression tool that has a built in benchmark, a way to tell just how fast a system can do this programs given task. We simply run the benchmark up to 500MB processed and time how long it takes.

Our 25% gain in performance streak ends with WinRAR but not by much. Overall we are quite pleased with the benchmark results from the Rampage II Gene's 24/7 overclock. We clearly have a lot to gain by overclocking a system and investing in quality cooling to allow further overclocks. The best part is that the Gene can really handle being a work horse.