Asus Rampage Formula X48 Motherboard Review

BIOS Rundown

We will now take a swim through the ocean blue, also known as the BIOS. ASUS has been building motherboards for a long time and they always setup an intuitive BIOS with all of the appropriate options categorized correctly. We fully expect to find the same with this Rampage Formula BIOS, let's find out.

The initial welcome screen provides us with all the usual information including hard drive configuration, date, time, and language selection. There are actually six languages offered in the BIOS; English, French, German, Japanese, and two dialects of Chinese. The System information section at the bottom of the page provides us with information regarding the BIOS version, processor, and memory installed.

Alright, ASUS doesn't mess around with the meat and potatoes of the BIOS with the overclocking section being second in line. It is also very nice to see that every single overclocking setting is located in this central location. The first image is of the entire section at the BIOS defaults. We can see memory timings are hidden, there are no voltage adjustments, and the overall options are minimal. Changing the AI Overclock Tuner setting to manual opens the barn doors wide open though. The second image shows the un-inhibiting list of voltage adjustments once we are in manual mode. Each voltage range is selectable through itemized lists as seen in the third image above using the vDIMM as an example. Below is a table of available voltage options and their increments for the Rampage Formula. But speaking of memory, once we go manual, the un-equaled amount of memory options become available for our manipulation as seen by the fourth image above. For memory clockers and tweakers alike, this amount of memory timing options has only been available previously on DFI boards...this is a welcome site for us here at Hardware Canucks. ASUS has completely blown our socks off.

The last image above shows the newest addition to the X48 BIOS options that was not available on the ASUS X38 boards. Transaction Booster has always been an option, but not to this degree. We now have a Common Performance Level as well as individual Pull-In channels. This, in essence, gives us a finer control over tRD or more commonly known as Performance Level. tRD is the single most influential setting on chipset performance and we finally have a straight forward and complete control over its manipulation. Two big fat thumbs up go out to ASUS for taking this step. Adjusting tRD has been a bit messy in previous chipsets but that is a thing of the past with this straight forward approach. Here is that chart of voltage ranges:

It is clear that some of these voltages options are down right crazy, even if your running your CPU under liquid nitrogen. Allowing a selection of 2.40v for vCORE could almost be considered irresponsible as there is absolutely no need for it. Perhaps selecting 2.40v will result in much lower a voltage being supplied but still, making the option so easy for someone is going to kill a CPU or two. vDIMM is another one of those voltage ranges that far exceeds what anyone should be using for memory. 3.40v volts is highly not recommended for DDR2, heck, north of 2.50v is highly recommended to stay below...and even then, just for benching. The rest of the voltages are more realistic like 1.85v maximum for vNB. With our X38 testing, this is the point where diminishing returns begins for extreme overclocking of the FSB/tRD/RAM, so it is nice to see at least this much available in the BIOS. There are, however, going to be some users that will want to go up to 2.00v. With the crazy amount of vCORE and vDIMM available, one would have assumed 2.00v for the NB wouldn't be too much to ask.

The advanced section of the BIOS holds a long list of the common options found on today's motherboards. The CPU Configuration page is where we find the ability to enable/disable the various features the C2D and other Intel CPUs including the SpeedStep functions among others. The rest of the sections are pretty much self explanatory so we won't examine them all that closely. We have shown the Onboard Device Configuration section though as it is where we find the options for the LCD Poster attachment. We can change what is displayed on the LCD Poster as well as whether or not the backlight should be on at the two different states of the system. Being able to have somewhat control over these extra features is nice and will come in handy for some of those that want to use the features but not be put off by not being able to control exactly how they are utilized.

As one might expect, the Power section has very little in the way of menu options but as we see in the second photo, there is plenty of information listed in the Hardware Monitor. Like the overclocking section, the Hardware Monitor reporting on the various voltages and temperatures is chalk full to the gills with data. This is extremely nice to see because it will mean full reporting of all of these voltages and temperatures in Windows via the ASUS software PC Probe II.

We also find BIOS control over fan speeds in this section. The ability to adjust all of the five fan headers on the board from the BIOS means there should be no need for software within Windows to do this job. With the Optional Fans, we have the ability to choose a straight percentage (70%, 80%, 90% or 100%) or we can set a target temperature that we believe is for the corresponding optional temperature probe. We were unable to fully test this feature as there were no temperature probes included with our sample. This ability to adjust fan speed based on an external temperature probe may be quite useful if the probes are placed in strategic locations. It would also be nice to receive the three potential temperature probes with the package.

There really is nothing to report on here in the Boot section of the BIOS. Nothing special has been added here by ASUS but nothing has been left out with all the regular options for boot settings being available.

As we wind down the look at the BIOS, we come across these ASUS only features in the last section, the Tools area. The ASUS EX Flash 2 is a BIOS option built into the board to allow for very simple BIOS updates. Simply extract the downloaded BIOS to a thumb drive, plug it in and head here. Browse to the new BIOS file from EZ Flash and you are set. The ASUS O.C. Profile tool gives us the ability to save two complete BIOS profiles and then re-load them at a different time. This feature is nice for when you get a nice stable overclock but want to play around some more. You can save the stable profile and then come back to the exact same settings later after trying other things without having to remember all of your settings.

The O.C. Profile feature at the bottom of this second screen takes us to a screen similar to the EZ Flash screen where it appears we can actually back up our OC Profiles to a thumb drive. Of course the only thumb drive available to us at this time decided it didn't want to have data written to it anymore so we weren't able to test this feature but it does look like kind of a handy option for possibly sharing BIOS settings amongst other Rampage users. To be honest, we couldn't remember if this ability has been available in previous ASUS motherboards or if it is new, but suspicions that this option has been around for a while and heavily underutilized seems to be the consensus here.