ASUS Rampage Extreme X48 Motherboard Review

Conclusion

The high end motherboard market is becoming a very interesting battle ground. With prices of these motherboards seeming to find no limit, the features they offer has increased to epic proportions. That never ending list of features has hit a crescendo with the ASUS Rampage Extreme. Not only has ASUS presented arguably the best Intel X48 based motherboard to the market, but they may just have produced the finest motherboard the enthusiast world has seen to date. Not only is the Rampage Extreme capable of some of the most intense overclocks that any motherboard can accomplish right now, it is also home to the most unique and rich set of features we have experienced. TweakIt, two physical BIOSs onboard, included Creative X-FI based soundcard, flexible chipset cooling, and a layout that is hard to disagree with are just a short list of those impressive features. The Rampage Extreme is the complete package and ASUS has done very well not to overlook anything.

As we saw, the overclocking potential of this motherboard is not only huge for extreme cooling and benchmarking, but also for making an everyday system lightning quick. The ease with which it climbed front side bus frequency with our hardware was staggering. We fully expected to get great overclocks out of the Rampage Extreme, but even we were impressed with just how well it clocked, and how easily we accomplished everything we did with the board. The BIOS is a bit messy for all of the features and their subsequent options, but the Extreme Tweaker section is bang on to what we want to see for an overclocking section. The inclusion of memory drive strengths would really open the door to further memory tweaking which seems to be the one big fault of the Rampage Extreme right now.

As mentioned, we have found a lot of issues with memory clocking in both our own hardware but also in forums. These issues tend to be at the high end of the spectrum and result from specific IC's mainly pointing at incompatibilities of Micron D9 based modules. The idea of different drive strengths required for these ICs seems feasible and we would like to see drive strength adjustments in the BIOS to test this theory. Samsung ICs seem to be more geared for the default drive strengths of the Rampage Extreme and a lot of good results have been seen with that memory on this motherboard. In the end though, the memory problems we are discussing are happening at the 950MHz+ range and really won't affect the majority of users, but at the same time, some manufacturers PC3-16000 modules are using Micron D9 based memory and may disappoint on this motherboard like our sample of Crucial Ballistix.

In the end though, we can't let the potentially fixable high memory clocking issues bring this board down to earth, it still is at the top of the pile and not by a small margin. We have had our hands on a lot of high-end motherboards from ASUS as well as other manufacturers. The ASUS Rampage Extreme is the single finest sample with an Intel X48 chipset providing an un-paralleled CrossFire X platform. NVIDIA's 790i chipset is also a fan of ours here at Hardware Canucks and even forgetting about its shortcomings, pales in comparison to the experience we had with the Rampage Extreme. Our hats are off to ASUS for creating a monster bencher and equally capable, feature laded, daily platform for users of all shapes and forms.

• Features, features and more features like TweakIt, twin BIOS, Fusion Block System, etc...
• A very esthetically pleasing motherboard and divine layout
• Typical ASUS build quality and depth of BIOS options
• Just as fine a daily driver as it is a track car, even when extremely cold
• All the benefits of the Intel X48 chipset with no compromises

• The high frequency memory clocking is causing issues for some users, us included
• One of the most, if not the most, expensive consumer motherboards available
• BIOS development seems to be slow for such a marquee piece of hardware