ASUS Rampage II Gene mATX LGA1366 Motherboard Review

Gaming Benchmarks

We have forced ourselves to step up to 3DMark Vantage results for all reviews because the public demands it. 3DMark Vantage is the newest in a long line of 3D benchmarking software from Futuremark and is the most elaborate to date. Featuring multiple presets for various system configurations, Vantage is the culmination of all 3DMarks past relying on system and GPU power for its results. We will stick to the Performance preset as it seems to be the most popular at this point in time.

In past motherboard reviews we have seen a distinct pattern of performance gains from overclocking the system in the benchmarks until we look at the gaming benchmarks. Having seen the same pattern of results in the system and memory benchmarks, we fully anticipate to see minimal gains in the gaming benchmarks. Of course 3DMark 06 and Vantage are going to show discrepancies because they both have CPU tests built into their final scores. It is the gaming benchmarks, particularly Crysis and Far Cry 2, that we are most interested in seeing.

We all know what Crysis is and how much it beats up systems but we wanted to add it to the gaming benchmarks to see how system changes can improve performance on a mid-level system. Detail levels are all set to Very High with the resolution at 1680x1050 with 4xAA. We ran the benchmarks with a demo of the Sphere level in DX9 and 64-bit. The game looks great with this setup and plays just well enough to keep us happy.

As suspected, we have a virtual tie right down the board in Crysis. This game just continues to prove that it is being GPU limited at these settings. Even as drivers from NVIDIA continually improve games, our Crysis bench just stays the same; both overclocked and at stock settings.

Another new fall release of this past silly season Far Cry 2 has some beautiful scenery but does lack that buttery smooth game play in places. A lot of moaning and groaning has occurred with Far Cry 2 but acceptable frame rates are much easier to achieve than Crysis and the game play is plenty smooth enough to enjoy. We were really able to crank up the settings with this benchmark on this setup.

Well, we do have a bit of improvement here in FarCry2 compared to reviews of past, but we still have absolutely no performance difference from our stock settings when compared to the massive overclock. Even a single GTX295 is the limiting factor so for Far Cry 2 and Crysis gamers, spend your money on GPU power and not so much the rest of the system.

The newest game in our testing sweet, Left 4 Dead was just added after we were asked to include a Source powered game in our memory benchmarks. Being based on the Source engine, there is definitely a chance that system performance will heavily influence the results. We used FRAPs to measure frames per second on a custom time demo of the hospital rooftop level.

The Source powered Left 4 Dead is a bit of a different story. The Source engine has always shown performance gains with system speed increases and Left 4 Dead continues to show those gains. The average frames per second improve markedly, but most important, the minimum frames per second raise significantly. During the intense fire fight on the hospital rooftop, the extra processing power from the overclocked system really helps keep frames per second up.