ASUS Rampage Extreme X48 Motherboard Review

Gaming Benchmarks

We have forced ourselves to step up to 3DMark Vantage results for all reviews because the public demands it. We have had our troubles in the past with this benchmark and the HD3870X2 but recent driver and Vista updates have alleviated all issues and it is smooth sailing now. 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.

What can we say about the 3Dmark results? First off, it was a bit of a surprise to see only a 1K difference between the two setups. We haven't spent a lot of time with Vantage but we were under the impression that system performance played more of a role than that, although, it is greater than a 10% performance gain going to the overclocked system so perhaps that does sound more realistic when put in those terms. Will Crysis or UT3 show the same percentage of gains?

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 High with the resolution at 1680x1050. 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.

The answer my friends is not blowing in the wind, but in the chart above. Crysis at first glance doesn't appear to show much of any benefit from the much faster system. That is until you focus on the lopsided Low results. The minimum Frames Per Second of the stock system is a lowly 17.50FPS making things awfully jerky at times. The overclocked system brings that up substantially to a 25.54FPS average making the game a lot more playable with detail levels set to high with these HD4850s in CrossFire at 1680x1050.

The detail levels are all maxed and the resolution set to 1680x1050 or what would be considered the playable settings for this configuration. We use a benchmarking utility to derive results from UT3 using a simulated 12 bot match on the Shangri-La level for 3 minutes. This is run 10 times with the results averaged out. There is some variance in the results of UT3, that is why the additional runs.

UT3 is a little bit different from Crysis as it shows substantial gains across the board between the two systems. UT3 has always been a system dependant series and even with a pair of very strong GPUs, the system still dictates the kind of frame rates one gets in this game.