Asus Rampage III Black Edition Review

Performance Analysis

As the CPU was overclocked by 46MHz less in the R3B than we achieved with the Rampage III Extreme, we saw slightly lower scores from the R3B. It was 0.078 seconds slower in WPrime, for example, and 0.187 seconds slower in SuperPi – that might not sound much, but it’s the difference between winning and losing in an overclocking competition.

The R3B was also 89 points slower than the R3E in our Media Benchmarks. After remembering that it’s necessary to sacrifice a goat to the pagan gods, we finally managed to get four Radeon HD 5870 graphics cards working together in CrossFireX configuration in the R3B. We also had to plug in an additional Molex cable to provide sufficient power to the last two PCI-E slots. Interestingly, unlike its performance in the 2D tests, the R3B screamed through 3DMark Vantage.


Its score of 46,476 is not only the fastest we’ve seen from an X58 motherboard with four HD 5870s, but also 12 per cent faster than the R3E. The R3B also ran 3DMark 11 without any complaints, although at this time we don’t have any other systems with which to compare its score of 5,600.

The R3B has a few quirks when overclocking it to its limits too, which made it a frustrating board to use, especially when time is short. It occasionally became stuck in POST loops that required us to power down the board – a neater recovery system would have been appreciated. Introducing four graphics cards also made the board lazy – after failed 3DMark runs, we regularly had to power down the board for five to 10 seconds before powering it back up again.


However, the LEDs and the GPU.DIMM menu were godsends when trying to troubleshoot failed CrossFireX setups – we could easily see whether all four cards were receiving the expected eight lanes of bandwidth via the BIOS tool, and whether a card had fallen over during boot or testing via the LEDS next to the GPU switches.

Conclusion
The Rampage III Black Edition is a ludicrous piece of kit, but that’s exactly what it’s meant to be – the best of the best. However, it failed to surpass the Rampage III Extreme in terms of overclockability, and the additions are gimmicky – a gamer-friendly ISP will make more of a difference than a Killer NIC, for example. In terms of raw performance, the R3B isn’t an automatic step up from the R3E either; yes, it’s much faster in the 3D benchmarks but it’s slower in the 2D benchmarks. With the kind of power circuitry, feature list and price that’s overkill for an everyday PC, and not enough overclocking ability to topple the R3E, the R3B doesn't quite match its billing as the best motherboard ever made.