by Doors4ever
08/13/2009 | 03:40 PM
It is always extremely interesting to review new mainboards. Each has its own set of features, its own distinguishing characteristics typical of the particular manufacturer and special mainboard model, each has its own character. Even if two boards are not very different from one another in their formal specifications, there will most likely still be difference in their performance in real applications. It is much more boring to test different mainboards from the same manufacturer based on the same chipset and belonging to the same series of products. As a rule, the differences between the solutions within the same series are in the variety and number of additional onboard controllers, in the cooling system design and the bundled accessories. Knowing from the previous review about the performance and behavior of the first tested mainboard, it is often possible to predict the way the next model will work. Nothing too exciting.
We have to admit that this time we were getting ready to review Asus Rampage Gene II mainboard without any serious expectations. We are already long familiar with the features and functionality of Asus P6T solution, so we didn’t expect to learn anything new. We could face certain limitations or issues connected with the smaller form-factor of the microATX mainboard. However, it turned out that we were seriously wrong in our anticipations. Both these mainboards are made by the same manufacturer and are based on the same Intel X58 Express chipset. But Asus P6T belongs to the common mainboard series and is the junior model in the lineup, while Asus Rampage Gene II mainboard is from “Republic of Gamers” series targeting gamers and enthusiasts. As a result, this exterior design of this mainboard as well as its features and BIOS functionality make is dramatically different from the larger in size but still younger sister. “One doesn’t have to be big to be efficient” – this saying describes Asus Rampage Gene II best of all. During our review we found out a lot of new things about this board, we really enjoyed working with it and we would like to share our terrific experience with you today.
Asus Rampage Gene II comes in a box with a flip front panel, but without any cool cut-out windows. All extra space on the cover as well as the back of the box is used to deliver the details on the mainboard’s main features and functionality.
Inside the box you find the mainboard itself with bundled accessories that include the following items:
Besides the drivers and electronic version of the user manual, the DVD disk contains a number of Asus brand name utilities and tools:
Moreover, there are also two marketing videos and several third-party applications:
There are two accessories included with the board that we would like to dwell on separately: the sticker and the LCD panel. As for the former, it is not a usual small logo sticker for the case front panel, but a huge picture. I doubt that it will fit onto a side panel of any microATX system case. It is more likely to look good on the wall or door. This logo is presented in almost its actual size in the lower right corner of the Asus Rampage Gene II box.
We have first come across the LCD panel that displayed the status of the POST procedure in text form during the system boot-up and after that – the current time on Asus Commando mainboard. Since then its functionality has been significantly improved. First, now you don’t have to turn the system case in order to see the display. A 90 cm cable will allow you to install the LCD screen anywhere you want. LCD Poster can display not only test, but also the actual POST codes. After the boot-up is completed, it may display not just current time, but also some monitoring data: the temperatures, voltages and fan rotation speeds will be rotating on the LCD screen.
Due to its small size, Asus Rampage Gene II looks very nice, I would even say pretty. Despite its small size, the layout is extremely well-balanced. Asus engineers did a very thorough and smart job on locating all mainboard components.
Processor voltage regulator circuitry uses an eight-phase design. The memory, chipset North Bridge and part of the North Bridge integrated into the CPU use individual two-phase voltage regulators. The mainboard was manufactured using only highest quality electronic components, including capacitors with polymer electrolyte. All power connectors are in very convenient spots. There is enough room around the processor socket to accommodate large CPU coolers.
Quite a common description for a high-quality mainboard, isn’t it? However, this quick look doesn’t reveal all the little details, which are of utmost importance when it comes to working with the board.
For example, graphics cards often make it hard to install and remove memory modules even on full-size boards. The memory DIMM slot locks often hit against the graphics card, which means you will have to remove the card before replacing the memory modules. In most cases, it is no big deal, but if you use a custom cooling solution or liquid-cooling system, you may also need to take it apart, too. Asus Rampage Gene II mainboard will never have this problem, even though the memory DIMM slots and the first PCI Express x16 graphics card slot are very close to one another. If you take a closer look, you can see that the locks are only on one side of the DIMM slots, opposite to the graphics card. Now that they have finally invented this solution, you start wondering how come that no one has ever come up with a simple and logical solution like that before?
By the way, simple replacement of the graphics card also could cause some problems. Since contemporary powerful graphics cards use very large cooling systems, it may be hard to reach for the slot lock that holds the card in the slot. Asus Rampage Gene II mainboard uses extremely wide PCI Express x16 locks, so if you are having hard time reaching the lock on one side, then you will most likely be able to open it from the other side.
Just like many other contemporary mainboards, Asus Rampage Gene II mainboard has Power On and Reset buttons. They are very large and are highlighted during work, unlike hard to notice button on other mainboards that are placed very close to one another. There is also a small “MemOK!” button close by. Sometime the mainboard may not be able to start because of the memory compatibility issues. In this case by pressing “MemOK!” button you will be able to load fault-tolerant memory settings that increase the chances of successful system booting.
Asus Rampage Gene II has a total of six fan connectors. All of them are four-pin ones, with PWM rotation speed control. Next to two of them there are contacts for connecting additional thermal pairs that allow setting their rotation speed in dependence on the corresponding temperatures. Three difference colors of LEDs – green, yellow and red - warn you against excessive increase in the processor Vcore, memory voltage, voltages of this chipset North or South Bridges. There is also a HDD status indicator and a MemOK! Indicator. The LEDs are not too bright, do not blink and do not annoy, but if you want you may turn off all the LEDs altogether.
Due to Intel ICH10R South Bridge, Asus Rampage Gene II mainboard has six Serial ATA ports with RAID support. PATA interface is implemented via JMicron JMB363 controller that provides one onboard SATA port and another in the form of eSATA on the connector panel (SATA On-the-Go). IEEE1394 support is implemented by VIA VT6315N controller, Gigabit network - by Realtek RTL8111C controller, and sound – by high-quality eight-channel ADI AD2000B HAD codec.
The mainboard back panel has almost all ports and connectors typical of a contemporary solution:
The components layout from the user manual will give you a better idea of the smart design of Asus Rampage Gene II mainboard and help notice a few minor details:
The detailed list of Asus Rampage Gene II technical specifications from the manufacturer web-site will let you once again see that small microATX Asus mainboard doesn’t yield to its full-size competitors in anything, and is even superior to some of them.
Asus mainboards use seriously revised AMI BIOS code. Its unique interface is totally recognizable and has a few peculiar traits about it. However, the BIOS of Asus Rampage Gene II mainboard has been modified even more, for example, compared against the BIOS of Asus P6T mainboard and these differences stand out right away. For instance, instead of the traditional “Main” section with a number of not very interesting parameters that you barely ever change, we first see “Extreme Tweaker” section containing almost all options for maximum system performance optimizations.
Asus mainboards have long had a special section with all overclocking-related settings, but it is for the first time that it is the very first one on the list. It is an absolutely correct decision that some mainboard makers made long time ago. It sets a highly positive mood for the entire system configuring experience right from the start. Although it was almost immediately that we noticed almost the only existing issue. The first two parameters are of purely informational value and report the expected clock speeds for the CPU and the memory. When we don’t change anything and the system works in its nominal mode, the board always reports memory frequency being 1333 MHz; although in reality the memory works at 1067 MHz, just like on other mainboards.
“Tuning Mode” parameter is intended for self-restriction. When it is set to “Extreme OC”, we can access all the available settings, while in “Gaming” mode we can work with a considerably shorter list of parameters. “CPU Level Up” and “Memory Level Up” parameters will be of great help to commencing overclockers who would like to “play” the overclocking game. Yes, to play, because these overclocking algorithms are far from being perfect. For example, you can overclock your CPU to its maximum in automatic mode by setting the “CPU Level Up” parameter to “i7-965-3.20G”. In this case the CPU clock frequency will increase to 3.2 GHz after the corresponding increase in the base clock, but the memory frequency will remain fairly low.
To achieve these results, some of the voltages will also be automatically increased:
Things get even trickier, when “Memory Level Up” parameter kicks in. you may think that all you need to do in this case is simply increase the memory frequency, but the board will in fact perform a much more complicated succession of actions. For example, by choosing “DDR3-1800MHz” setting, you will increase the base frequency and raise the memory speed to 1800 MHz at the same time. To make sure that the CPU frequency will remain as close to its nominal value as possible in this case, its clock multiplier will be lowered.
This is when all necessary voltages are again adjusted automatically. The memory voltage will also go up, although the board doesn’t show it in any way.
I don’t know how many Asus mainboard owners use these overclocking tools, but I think the commencing overclockers should realize how imperfect they are. That is why we will set “Ai Overclock Tuner” parameter to Manual to ensure correct and efficient overclocking experience later on.
Moreover, “Ai Overclock Tuner” parameter may be also set to “X.M.P.”. In this case the mainboard will on its own change the memory frequency and timings and increase the corresponding voltages, so that the resulting settings could correspond to the ones recorded in one of the two memory SPD profiles. By setting “Ai Overclock Tuner” parameter to “ROG Memory Profile” we can choose one of the three profiles: Speedy, Flying or Lightning. This is when the mainboard will use more and more aggressive timings for the selected memory frequency. In this case I was a little upset that all “Ai Overclock Tuner” settings are mutually exclusive. We either set it to “Manual”, or choose ”ROG Memory Profile”. I think they could have made “ROG Memory Profile” an individual parameter, so that it could be possible to improve the memory timings automatically during manual CPU and memory overclocking.
Next we see another pleasant surprise. The “CPU Configuration” sub-section with all settings related to processor technologies has finally been moved into “Extreme Tweaker” section. Although, as we will see later on, it hasn’t been removed from the “Advanced” section and is duplicated there. It must have been done for those not attentive enough. :)
We are not going to comment on a number of obvious settings in the “Extreme Tweaker” section including “DRAM Frequency” that will allow setting the desired memory frequency, “UCLK Frequency” that will automatically adjust the UnCore frequency accordingly, “QPI Link Data Rate” that will allow adjusting the QPI bus frequency.
“DRAM Timing Control” parameter leads you to a page with numerous memory timings that can be adjusted on Asus Rampage II Gene mainboard. It is very convenient to have those special info lines displaying the current timings settings and to be able to adjust all parameters independently. What I mean is that changing only one setting won’t require you to adjust all the others as well, they will remain automatically set. Although it could have been much more convenient if the current memory timings were displayed not as a line but in a separate column on the right-hand side – each opposite to the corresponding parameter.
We have finally reached “Extreme Tweaker” section with the group of parameters for voltage control. At first we were very pleased to see “EPU II Phase Control” parameter there. Asus mainboards were among the first to change the number of active phases in the processor voltage regulator circuitry depending on the current load level. However, before they could only control the energy-saving modes on the software level using Asus EPU-6 Engine utility. Now you can select the desired mode right in the BIOS. Unfortunately, we didn’t notice any significant changes in the mainboard’s power consumption after changing “EPU II Phase Control” parameter.
“Extreme OV” parameter, just like “Tuning Mode” parameter in the beginning of the section is required for additional protection. It sets limitations in the voltage adjustment intervals. For example, if you enable it, you will be able to send an extremely high voltage of 2.5 W to the CPU. If “Extreme OV” parameter is disabled, the Vcore is limited with 1.8 W max, which is actually also quite high.
I really liked that I could see the current voltages and temperatures right where I was performing their adjustments. However, the voltages displayed in a single line are a little hard to perceive. You have to focus and determine that 1.111 V is the processor core voltage, 1.819 V - CPU PLL Voltage, and 1.085 V- QPI/DRAM Core Voltage. Just like in case with the memory timings, it would be much more convenient if these voltages were displayed in a separate table column, each opposite to the corresponding parameter.
Processor core voltage can now be set as is, if the “CPU voltage Control” parameter is set to Absolute (VID), or in a relative form. In case of Relative (Offset) setting, we will simply add the chosen value to the nominal CPU Vcore. By the way, it is very convenient that you don’t have to use “+” and “-“ keys or navigation arrows to go through the list of supported values in the drop-down menu. You can enter the desired number using your keyboard and the mainboard will set the closest value to the number entered. If the setting is too high, it will be highlighted yellow and then red. In some cases you may get a warning message.
Overall, despite a few drawbacks we pointed out in the “Extreme Tweaker” section, its new functionality looks very impressive. We will get back to some of the drawbacks later, and now let’s move over to the “Advanced” section.
As we have already promised, this is where you can find the extra “CPU Configuration” sub-section. However, we are primarily interested in a different sub-section: “LCD Poster Control”. It allows configuring the information that will be displayed on the external LCD Poster display, changing the operational mode for the LED indicators or turn them off completely.
In the “Power” section the biggest changes occurred in “Hardware Monitor” sub-section. Now when you get there, you won’t see any parameter values, but just a list of additional sub-sections.
To see the current voltages, you have to access the first sub-section.
The second sub-section will tell you how much the temperatures have increased and will allow setting maximum allowed temperatures in the interval from 70 to 100 °C. There is a 10 °C increment. You can turn this feature off completely, if you want.
The next sub-section will show you the rotation speed of the connected fans, and the last one allows configuring the fan rotation speed control.
Everything is perfect, except the addition of several new sub-sections. True, if you gather all available parameters in a single “Hardware Monitor” section, like it was before, there will be so many of them that the entire list won’t fit into a single screen. So what? “Extreme Tweaker” section is also pretty big, but everything is right there when you need it and you don’t have to jump from one section to another looking for the necessary settings. And in “Hardware Monitor” section they did it the other way around, making us jump from sub-section to sub-section. I believe they should have left the older data representation form when everything was in a single section.
Now let’s go over to the section called “Tools”, where we will find a number of familiar sub-sections and a few new things.
I consider Asus EZ Flash 2 utility for BIOS updating built into the BIOS itself to be the most informative, functional and convenient of all programs like that. Its interface, however, reminds me of the file manager that is why it is fairly easy to find the presaved BIOS version for further upgrade. It supports not only removable media but also standard hard disk drives, it can read the data from the partitions formatted in NTFS. During the BIOS updating procedure you will get the date and version number for the current and new BIOS version together with the mainboard model name it supports. This time we didn’t notice any serious changes in the functionality, however, more aggressive and intuitively clear use of color makes this utility even more informative. Once you’ve started the BIOS updating procedure, the old version is erased and the bar at the bottom gets dark, after that the new BIOS version is loaded and the bar fills with yellow color. Green color indicates that the BIOS has been successfully updated and the procedure completed without errors.
The Asus O.C. Profile window looks very similar. This utility allows using external media to save BIOS settings profiles. It also allows creating copies of the settings profiles and even exchanging the profiles with other users. But in reality the built-in memory is still used more often. This feature has also undergone some long-awaited and noticeable changes recently: instead of two profiles you can now save up to eight, and you can even provide each of them with its own unique name that will remind you of its contents.
I believe you will agree with me that the BIOS of Asus Rampage Gene II mainboard is absolutely outstanding. Far not every full-size overclocker mainboard can boast an impressive set of features like the one we have just seen by this small microATX solution. However, this is not the end of our BIOS discussion yet.
We have discussed almost all important features of the Asus Rampage II Gene mainboard BIOS. However, some entire sections and sub-sections have been left out. We did it on purpose and now we are going to get back to them. Speaking of the BIOS in general, its functionality is absolutely superb, but we have already mentioned quite a few drawbacks. We are sure that the incorrectly displayed memory frequency in the nominal mode will be fixed shortly. We are not sure that they will replace the string-type with column type display, although it would be much more convenient to perceive information displayed in columns. We also can’t promise that we will get a unified “Hardware Monitor” section back instead of a combination of individual sub-sections. I hope that they will also remove the unnecessarily duplicated parameters and the structure will be more thought-through. For example, there are several parameters in the “Extreme Tweaker” section that refer to the external LCD Poster panel. Why are they there, while it could make much more sense to have them moved to the special sub-section called “LCD Poster and LED Control”?
While we were listing all these small issues, we have finally got to a more significant problem: lack and in some cases I would even say concealment of information. First of all I am talking about new unknown functions and features of Asus Rampage II Gene mainboard. We have just mentioned a few parameters connected with the LCD Poster panel. The idea behind the first one is actually quite transparent. “Debug Mode” parameter can be set to String or Code, i.e. the status of the startup POST procedure will be displayed in text form or digital code form. But what does the second parameter called “Keyboard TweakIt Control” stand for? If we open the user manual we will get the following “explanation”: the parameter may be set to Disabled or Enabled. It reminds us of DFI mainboards, because this was the way they described the functionality of unknown parameters: possible settings are Mode 1 and Mode 2 but not a single word about the difference between them. But DFI has already corrected this mistake, there are special manuals available with examples and detailed description of unknown parameters like that, so why would Asus make the same mistake?
This is a rhetorical question. Besides, the information about the unknown parameter is available in the mainboard BIOS. Part of the screen on the right-hand side is devoted to contextual comments. If you select “Keyboard TweakIt Control”, then you get… not the detailed description, of course, but just a hint. It turns out that when you use a PS/2 keyboard, you can manage the information displayed on the LCD poster screen using navigation arrow keys.
We connect PS/2 keyboard and only now after a few experiments start to understand what’s going on. The “LCD Poster Mode” parameter in the “LCD Poster and LED Control” sub-section by default is set at “Current Time”. It means that once the startup stage is over the external LCD display will show current time. It is not the most useful information, but you can change it to “All Voltage”, “All Temperature” or “All Fan Speed”. In this case, all voltages, temperatures or fan rotation speeds that Asus Rampage II Gene can control will be displayed on the LCD Poster screen consecutively in a loop. Independently of the setting entered in the BIOS, you can use PS/2 keyboard to replace the current parameter group with a different one right from Windows, or make the screen show only one particular voltage, temperature or fan speed.
I totally encourage the presence of brief contextual comments in the BIOS, but believe that there always should be a full detailed description of all functions in the user manual. Even the functions with seemingly obvious functionality should be described, not to mention the unknown ones. In fact there should be no “unknown” parameters at all, and if something completely new appears, then the explanation should be twice as detailed.
There is a mysterious “iROG Configuration” sub-section in the “Advanced” section of the BIOS. Its description in the user manual is very vague that is why I decided to take my chances and enabled the mysterious “iROG Timer Keeper” parameter. It turned out that in this case the mainboard simply starts taking the on-time. Although I still didn’t find out what “iROG ID_Number Information” actually stands for.
In this respect I would like to remind you that some time in 2004 the BIOS of Abit mainboards acquired a new sub-section called “Power Cycle Statistics”. We checked it out only once and never came back to its contents. Why? Because everything there is simple and clear without any additional commentary. Mainboards allowed keeping track of all statistics: current and total on-time, number of system boot-ups, number of reboots, etc.
Well, there were much more functions there than by Asus Rampage II Gene mainboard. Moreover, everything was obvious, there were no unknown abbreviations like iROG and there was no need to consult the manual to learn about certain parameters and their meaning. That seems to be a perfect approach. And when we have to guess what’s hiding behind a strange abbreviation, when there is no clear description and you have to experiment in order to understand what’s the deal – this is a totally wrong approach. BIOS is a very complex thing already. Without knowing possible consequences of your actions, you should never change any settings, but Asus actually makes us do it.
By the way, the external LCD panel called Abit Guru Clock appeared also back in 2004. And even today it is superior to LCD Poster from Asus in a number of parameters, but it just happened to come up here.
I decided to leave the “TweakIt Batch File” subsection from the “Tools” section for dessert, because I couldn’t really figure out what it is meant for. We can set ten parameters: base frequency and nine different voltages, and then we can save all info twice and then later restore. We have only one question here: why would we need all that?
After I failed to find an answer to this question, I even checked out a few already posted reviews of the Asus Rampage II Gene mainboard on other web-sites, but the reviewers seemed to have found no explanation either. Some assumed that it was some kind of a BIOS notepad that should help remember what voltages correspond to what base frequency. I doubt it is the case. Why would anyone need to save two versions of very limited settings data if we can use Asus O.C. Profile to save eight full settings profiles? Anyway, I failed to guess the meaning of it and didn’t find any description in the manual, so the idea behind this mysterious section remained a secret to us.
Just in case I would like to make one thing very clear: I really liked the functionality of the Asus Rampage II Gene BIOS. There are a lot of parameters available for configuring, the supported ranges are broad enough and the increments are small. The BIOS functionality will be useful not only for commencing and experienced overclockers but also to common users, who care about the efficiency of their system. Unfortunately, there are a few not very serious issues that make working with this BIOS not as convenient as it could have been and the lack of appropriate documentation doesn’t allow using the BIOS functionality to its utmost extent. Honestly, there are no real problems there, the pointed out issues are not critical, and Asus definitely did a terrific job on their BIOS. And this part of our review appeared only to make sure that as time goes on the next BIOS versions will become even better and even more convenient.
All our tests were performed in the following system:
We used Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate x86 operating system with Service Pack 2, a set of chipset drivers version 9.1.0.1012, and ATI Catalyst 9.6 graphics card driver.
If you were going to start reading about the complications we had during system assembly or issues we uncovered during work, I will have to disappoint you; you are in the wrong place. We had no problems, no difficulties, no issues of any kind. Asus Rampage II Gene mainboard worked smoothly and stably. When there was no serious load Intel processor power-saving technologies lowered the CPU clock frequency multiplier and reduced its Vcore.
When the load increased, its clock multiplier increased to 21x due to Intel Turbo Boost technology. The memory in all cases remained at 1066 MHz with 8-8-8-20-1T timings.
Since Asus Rampage II Gene mainboard performs absolutely normally in nominal mode and doesn’t deviate anywhere from what is considered standard, let’s move on to the performance tests right away. For the purposes of comparison we chose Gigabyte GA-EX58-Extreme mainboard that you should already be very well familiar with.
Despite the different categories these products belong too, both boards perform almost equally fast, and in a number of cases the small Asus Rampage II Gene looks even more attractive. The only not quite successful test was SuperPi.
We measured the power consumption using Extech Power Analyzer 380803 device. This device was connected before the system PSU, i.e. it measured the power consumption of the entire system without the monitor, including the power losses that occur in the PSU itself. When we took the power readings in idle mode, the system was completely idle: there were even no requests sent to the hard drive at that time. We used LinX program to load the CPU. For more illustrative picture we created a graph showing the power consumption growth depending on the increase in CPU utilization as the number of active computational threads in LinX changed.
For some reason, we always subconsciously expect a small mainboard to consume less power than a full-size one, but this time we can’t claim even the parity between the two solutions. Strange as it might seem, but microATX Asus Rampage II Gene mainboard turned out about 25-35 W more power-hungry than its larger competitor. Only under maximum processor load the power consumption difference drops to 20 W remaining still pretty noticeable. The mainboards were compared in their fully-functional state, no controllers were disabled, all settings were at their defaults, we only enabled all power-saving technologies in the mainboards BIOS. For some reason, this was when I thought about the external LCD Poster panel but its power consumption was minimal and disabling it didn’t affect the results. Unfortunately, we will have to put up with the fact that in nominal mode Asus Rampage II Gene mainboard cannot be considered an energy-efficient solution.
We checked out the overclocking potential of Asus Rampage II Gene mainboard according to our standard methodology, but taking into account all the typical peculiarities of Asus mainboards that we are aware of. At first, as usual, we found the maximum base frequency when the board could work stably with the lowered CPU clock frequency multiplier. 215 MHz is a very good result, which is typical of many good mainboards. then we checked of the board could raise the frequency of our Kingston HyperX DDR3-1866 KHX14900D3T1K3/3GX memory modules to the nominal value of 1866 MHz. No, we had no issues or complications. We only had to increase the memory voltage to 1.65 V and QPI/DRAM Core Voltage – only to 1.325 V. The CPU wasn’t overclocked in this case, but further tests showed that even when the CPU is overclocked the board experiences no problems if the memory is working at higher frequencies.
These were all standard parts of our overclocking routine, now we should proceed with the special tricks. You may already know that Asus mainboards for Intel processors have one typical drawback that the company cannot eliminate for many years already. At some point during CPU overclocking the mainboard suddenly decides that it must increase processor core voltage to ensure its stability. In fact, it is a theoretically correct step and we increase the CPU core voltage ourselves during overclocking, but only when it is really necessary. The mainboard cannot know the potential of a specific CPU sample that is why it plays it safe and increases the voltage sooner than needed. Much sooner. As a result, Intel processor power-saving technologies partially stop working. In idle mode the multiplier will be lowered, but the voltages will remain increased. For example, Asus P6T mainboard allowed to overclock our Intel Core i7-920 processor “for free” only until 152 MHz base frequency. As soon as the frequency increased to 153 MHz or higher, the CPU core voltage was pushed up and we had to forget about energy-efficient overclocking for good.
Knowing these peculiarities of Asus mainboards, we decided to try and raise the base frequency to 160 MHz. The result was quite predictable: CPU core voltage was increased and remained increased when idle. Everything is just the way it was before, isn’t it? No it isn’t! It turned out that when “CPU voltage Control” parameter was changed from Absolute (VID) to Relative (Offset), Asus Rampage II Gene mainboard starts acting completely differently. If the voltage is increased, you can barely notice it, and all Intel processor power-saving technologies continue working as they should. Finally!
We know from our previous reviews that the optimal overclocking for our Intel Core i7-920 processor is by raising the base frequency to 181 MHz. In this case you should increase the memory frequency and lower the timings to 8-8-8-22-1T. The tests confirmed that Asus Rampage II Gene can work in this overclocking mode just fine. Only when we enabled protection against voltage drop under load, the board slightly increased it. If we disable “CPU Load-Line Calibration” parameter, the voltage won’t be sufficient to ensure CPU stability in overclocked mode. It is no big deal, because now when we set “CPU Voltage Control” parameter to Relative (Offset), the CPU core voltage may be increased freely. To ensure stability we had to increase it just by 0.0125 V, and all Intel power-saving technologies remained up and running in idle mode lowering not only the clock frequency multiplier, but also the CPU Vcore.
When the load increased, the processor clock multiplier rose to 21x according to the static implementation of Intel Turbo Boost technology raising the resulting CPU clock to 3.8 GHz.
As a result, we can sum up the main peculiarities of Asus Rampage II Gene behavior during overclocking in the following table:
Great! Now we should only find out if Asus Rampage II Gene is faster than Gigabyte GA-EX58-Extreme working in the same mode, or slower:
And again we don’t see any serious difference in performance results between these two completely different mainboards. In identical testing conditions they both demonstrate the same performance level. And what will our power consumption tests show? The results here turned out much better than in nominal mode:
In most cases power consumption of Asus Rampage II Gene mainboard is still higher than that of Gigabyte GA-EX58-Extreme, but this time the difference is no higher than 10 W, and under maximum CPU load the results of both boards level out completely.
Frankly speaking, success of our today’s hero - Asus Rampage II Gene – pleases us more than it normally would. And it is not just about the board itself, but about the great work the entire Asus mainboard division has done on this product. While competitors step by step improved the consumer qualities of their products, Asus was in a sort of holding pattern. They did release a lot of mainboards, but there was barely anything new in terms of quality. Among the definite innovations, I can only recall the increase in the number of BIOS settings profiles that the user could save (8 instead of 2) and the ability to assign these profiles unique names. We could also mention the ability to read BIOS images from the NTFS partitions. And that was about it. Things had even gone so far that some experts predicted off the record that Asus would soon wrap up their massive mainboard business and focus on other market segments. We hope that these forecasts are not true and the new functions introduced in Asus Rampage II Gene mainboard are the so long-awaited improvement of the situation – all these are clear indications that Asus mainboard division is working real hard to soon please us with more great new solutions.
As for the actual Asus Rampage II Gene mainboard discussed today, it turned out an extreme success. Pretty good accessories bundle, smart and convenient layout despite small size, excellent BIOS functionality, superb CPU and memory overclocking potential – all these things command respect and change the way we take this small microATX mainboard. There are a few drawbacks, but they are insignificant and can be easily eliminated. And don’t be misled by the “kid’s” size of the Asus Rampage II Gene mainboard: it is a fully-functional solution that will give a head start to many competitors out there. The only restriction we uncovered is the higher power consumption in nominal mode. If you are not planning to overclock your CPU, then maybe you should consider a more energy-efficient mainboard. In all other vases, Asus Rampage II Gene will never disappoint you.