ASUS Rampage Extreme X48 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.

With the rather lofty CPU frequency we are running on the overclocked setup and tight memory timings, we almost cracked the 10 minute mark in SPi 32M. This is a testament to just how quick the north bridge has this system running. SPi relies heavily on the memory sub-system speed and this setup has gobs of it with plenty to spare.

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.

Our best PCMark Vantage scores are usually hanging around the 5K mark but with the HD4850 CrossFire setup, that is easily achieved by even the stock settings with the overclocked settings getting into the 6K range. PCMark Vantage clearly can be influenced substantially by GPU power and the HD4850s are obviously a big upgrade from a single HD3870X2.

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 all about CPU power and shows very little to no gains at all from the rest of the system speed. This is why we see such a huge difference between times of the two setups. As one would imagine, 3.33GHz simply can't compete with 4.29GHz...but that is just pointing out the obvious.

Moving from some of the more 'synthetic' benchmarks, we find ourselves smack dab in the middle of a VOB to DivX encoding task. We will take a VOB rip of the movie Before The Devil Knows Your Dead, and convert it into DivX using the default 720P setting of DivX converter v6. This is a real life test of a task that may be routinely seen these days.

With the synthetics out of the way, we can now see just how much a faster system can perform everyday tasks and as one might have guessed, the overclocked system completely smashes the stock system to pieces in a DivX conversion. With our overclocked system we knocked a full 20 minutes off the encoding time of the 90+ minute job the stock system did. This is a result of not only the faster CPU frequency but also the memory and the rest of the system from the higher FSB.

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.

The best way to encode an MP3 continues to be the good old fashioned way with Lame and although it is single threaded, there is no substitute. Again, the overclocked system shows solid gains in the encoding time and takes the stock time to task.

Adobe Photoshop CS3 is full x64 compliant and ready and able to use every single CPU cycle our processor has available. Since digital photography is as popular as roller skates were in the 70's, we are going to be timing how long it takes to convert 100 RAW images from a Canon 20D into half size JPG files of maximum quality.

The last of the real-world benchmarks we did in this section is the conversion of RAW images to JPG. Now here, despite the overwhelming difference in system speed, the difference is minimal. This simply goes to show that conventional hard drive performance is limiting some of our daily tasks, such as converting large images as the hard drive read and write times are easily going to be a bottleneck. The future of Solid State Drives is quite exciting and these results highlight their need in everyday computers.