ASUS Rampage Extreme X48 Motherboard Review

BIOS Rundown

This BIOS is not as well laid out as the recently reviewed Gigabyte EP45T-Extreme so there are going to be a lot more screenshots required. With that said, the Rampage Extreme BIOS leaves nothing to chance and covers almost everything any user could ask for.

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Well, here it is, a single screen that sums up this BIOS perfectly...complete. ASUS ROG motherboards have always had a great BIOS but the Rampage Extreme takes it to a whole new level. First and foremost, the very first screen you come to when entering the BIOS is the Extreme Tweaker section, which is an absolute delight for someone doing a lot of overclocking. We have highlighted a couple menus that are available including the straps, and memory ratios. When Strap selection is set to Auto, the full slew of memory options become available and the strap is then appropriately chosen. The full plethora of memory timings seen in this screenshot that are grayed out are available for manipulation when set to manual providing all the memory tweaking options most anyone could ask for, drive strengths aside. The second and third screenshots provide some insight into the DRAM Skew options as well as the manual tRD selection AKA Performance Level. The Pull-In options for tRD are also available that we found in the Rampage Formula BIOS and allow for fine control of tRD. In fact, the Rampage Extreme BIOS will be very familiar to Rampage Formula owners or users of pretty much any other ASUS motherboard. Next up on the large list of Extreme Tweaker options are the voltages.

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Above are just a couple of menu options for voltages showing the GTL and vREF adjustments available to us. The voltage options on this board are un-heard of, and an absolute joy to work with. Aside from being able to simply type in the voltage you want, the voltage increments are as small as we have ever seen on a motherboard. For a complete list of voltage ranges, see the chart below:

We weren't kidding when we said these voltage adjustments were complete, and just look at those maximums. Again, ASUS left everything on the field and has made this motherboard the ideal option for extreme overclockers and benchmarkers.

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The Main menu selection comes next with our standard options including the handy System Information section which provides us with some basic information about the system, including which BIOS we are on and the method in which we are booting to that BIOS. Some motherboards don't have an information page with the BIOS revision and processor information but ASUS always does and we appreciate it.

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The advanced section is home to some of the more standard areas including CPU configuration of features, onboard devices, and USB configuration which are all pretty self explanatory. There are also a couple ROG specific sections like the LCD Poster and Other Configuration sections which provide us with control over some of the LCD Poster functions as well as the rules about the iROG BIOS crashes. Again, our dual BIOS to the rescue allowing us to automatically copy one BIOS to the other if the one we are using crashes, or to simply switch to the second BIOS. Full control over this second BIOS is something I will continue to talk about as it is such a great option to have a fully controllable second BIOS onboard.

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The Power section of a BIOS is normally quite useless to show with screenshots but when you have hardware monitoring like this, it is an absolute must. Like everything else in this BIOS and ROG boards in the past, the Voltage and Temperature Monitoring sections are absolutely complete. There is no guesswork, there is no assuming, and everything is there in plain sight. This is all part of the premium ROG package. My only wish is that the hardware monitoring sections of the ROG boards were available on other high-end boards from ASUS but in the end, this is one of the items that distinguishes ROG boards from the rest.

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The Boot section has one notable area, the BIOS Boot Priority page. Obviously this is where we can select which BIOS the board boots to in here when the onboard jumper is set to menu select. You won't find this section on any other motherboard currently available at this time because no other motherboard at this time has two completely independent BIOS chips that users have full access to.

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The last section in this lengthy BIOS look is the Tools section. Here ASUS has included their intelligently simple ASUS EZ Flash 2 which allows the quickest of BIOS updates, and also the ASUS O.C. Profile area. The profile saving area gets a bit of a revamp from ASUS boards of past giving us the ability to name the two profiles we can save. This is a nice step forward but more profiles would also be a nice addition to this feature from ASUS. One catch though, we couldn't rename profiles with numbers, only letters. DFI still wins this battle with the CMOS Reloaded feature but ASUS is showing signs of working to match that.

That finally wraps up the BIOS section and overall, we couldn't have expected much more from ASUS on the Rampage Extreme BIOS. All the standard ASUS features are there, a couple new ones thrown in, and the monitoring section is 100% complete. If you are at all familiar with ASUS BIOSs on their other motherboards, this one will make you feel right at home, we sure did.