ASUS Rampage Extreme X48 Motherboard Review

Extreme Overclocking & Benching

Before we conclude our broadcasting day, we thought we would present a special treat and a testament to just what kind of motherboard the Rampage Extreme is. We had a 9 hour liquid nitrogen (LN2) cooled session with this board recently and it held up extremely well throughout the 2V vCORE CPU beat down. We ran single card HD4850 and CF HD4850 alongside some 2D benchmarks with the E8600 at 6GHz or higher the whole day. We stuck with the Fusion block on the stock heat sink assembly and the board performed admirably getting a number of top spots for the HD4850s in a couple benchmarks and some close second and thirds. We also managed to crack into the Global top ten on HWBot.org in SPi 32M, and AM3 for multiple cards as well as a solid top 20 Global in 3DMark 01. These are all quite impressive results considering our CPU limitation of 6150MHz and the rather 'mundane' GPUs used. Here are a couple photos of the setup during the session in various forms.

And of course, the complete list of hardware used, which is very similar to our normal test setup.

• Motherboard: ASUS Rampage Extreme (obviously)
• Processor: Intel C2D E8600 ES
• Processor Cooling: MMouse Rev 3 CU LN2/Dry Ice Pot
• North Bridge Cooling: Fusion Waterblock / Thermochill PA 120.2 / DD5
• Memory: G.Skill HZ 2x1GB PC3-12800 CL7
• Power Supply: Silverstone ST56ZF
• Video Card: 2 x ATI HD4850 512MB DDR3
• Additional Fans: 120mm AD1212MS-A73GL 2050RPM/80.5CFM
• Hard Drives: Seagate 7200.9 80GB SATAII 8MB cache
• OS:Windows XP Pro SP3

Here is the full slate of results starting with the 3D results and ending with the 2D scores. Links to the ORB comparisons as well as the HWBot.org comparisons are below each screenshot. Just click on each screenshot for the full size. We have tried to include as much information as we could in each screenshot about the voltages and settings used...enjoy.

3DMark 01 - Single HD4850 click for full size... ORB - Compare HWBot.org - Compare	3DMark 01 - CF 2 x HD4850 click for full size... ORB - Compare HWBot.org - Compare
3DMark 03 - CF 2 x HD4850 click for full size... ORB - Compare HWBot.org - Compare
3DMark 05 - Single HD4850 click for full size... ORB - Compare HWBot.org - Compare	3DMark 05 - CF 2 x HD4850 click for full size... ORB - Compare HWBot.org - Compare
Aquamark 3 - Single HD4850 click for full size... HWBot.org - Compare	Aquamark 3 - CF 2 x HD4850 click for full size... HWBot.org - Compare
Super Pi 1M click for full size... HWBot.org - Compare	Super Pi 32M click for full size... HWBot.org - Compare
Hexus PiFast click for full size... HWBot.org - Compare	CPU-Z FSB click for full size... CPU-Z - Validation

In the end, our dewar was empty after a solid day of benching and the board was no worse for wear. We did have a bit of a BIOS issue when first bringing temps down but thanks to the second BIOS available onboard, it wasn't more than a 5 second problem. TweakIt came in invaluable and we haven't had such an easy time benching as we did with the Rampage Extreme. You will also notice that we used the kit of memory we said we had high overclocking stability issues with. This is because this memory was great for benching, just not 24/7 stability at high clocks. The Rampage Extreme may not be the friendliest motherboard for memory right now, but hopefully BIOS updates alleviate these issues soon. There is one thing for certain though, it really is the best of the best motherboards available right now, and proved it once again today.