ASUS Rampage II Gene mATX LGA1366 Motherboard Review

3oh6 · | May 12, 2009

Voltage Regulation

The last couple motherboards I have looked at were fortunate enough to provide voltage read points for a lot of the voltages. This made for easy voltage monitoring for this section. The Rampage II Gene does not offer such a luxury. With the smaller m-ATX footprint, this is of no surprise really. In fact, we would have been shocked to see such a feature on this board like it's big brother the Rampage II Extreme has. The Gene is also a fairly under reported motherboard for such things as read points so we won't be relying on the digital multi-meter much for this section. We will simply focus on the BIOS and software readings from within Windows.

In addition to the standard software programs reporting voltages like Everest Ultimate, TurboV, PC Probe II, or the like; the Rampage II Gene also provides external monitoring through the LCD Poster and the Tweak-It function of the board. Now, unlike other Rampage boards with Tweak-It functionality, the Gene does not have a joystick on the motherboard. Again, space is at a premium with the Gene so ASUS took Tweak-It to the next level. We can enable Tweak-It functionality through the keyboard by holding down a selectable activation key. The keyboard arrow keys then hold the same functionality of the joystick on other Rampage boards. To be honest, we kind of found the keyboard Tweak-It to be a little bit easier because it didn't involve having to get up. Plus, if the motherboard is in a case, you still have full Tweak-It functionality.

Let's have a look at the voltage table outlining what type of variations we get from BIOS set, to Windows reported. Keep in mind that these voltages are from our 24/7 overall overclock.

	BIOS Set	BIOS Report	PC Probe II Idle	PC Probe II Load	DMM Idle	DMM Load
CPU Voltage	1.525v	1.501v	1.50v	1.45v	1.500v	1.472v
CPU Pll Voltage	1.81592v	1.819v	1.82v	1.82v	x	x
QPI/DRAM Voltage	1.40000v	1.422v	1.40v	1.43v	x	x
IOH Voltage	1.11341v	1.111v	1.12v	1.11v	x	x
IOH PCIE Voltage	1.51106v	1.508v	1.51v	1.51v	x	x
ICH Voltage	1.11341v	1.111v	1.11v	1.11v	x	x
ICH PCIE Voltage	1.51106v	1.501v	1.51v	1.50v	x	x
DRAM Bus Voltage	1.63031v	1.634v	1.62v	1.65v	1.618v	1.619v

It was nice to see pretty much every voltage report exactly what we had set. Obviously vCORE is different across the board but that is because we are running our overclock with vDROOP enabled. The only voltage that had us a little concerned is the vDIMM. We measured the vDIMM by taking one module out and measuring the first pin of the small section after the key. We have always used this voltage measuring point without issue on any other board so we have no reason to think the reading is being affected by the lack of a module in the DIMM. If the reading is true, then the board is supplying a good bit less voltage than we are selecting. Definitely not enough to cause the memory problems we were seeing but something you may need to keep in mind when clocking memory on this board.

Here are the OCCT charts with and without vDROOP enabled.

vDROOP Chart from OCCT - vDROOP Enabled

vDROOP Chart from OCCT - vDROOP Disabled

We won't get into the vDROOP discussion here, we are simply wanting to show that both options work as they should although disabling vDROOP does show an increase in vCORE under load instead of a flat line. Keep in mind that these are software readings so they should be taken with a grain of salt.

The last of the charts above are for vDIMM, vTT, vNB, and vPLL. These are simply the OCCT charts taken during our voltage and temperature testing. Same rules apply as above, take the results with a grain of salt as they are software readings. Overall though, things look pretty solid with this board. vTT and vDIMM seem to fluctuate a lot more than vPLL or vNB which is normal, but vTT does seem to jump around a lot.