Overclocking

Overclocking performance on the Rampage II Gene was fairly average - we managed to hit a nice round 200MHz base clock with a Core i7-920 test CPU. This was with a 1.45V CPU with a 1.9V PLL, 1.4V QPI/DRAM Core (uncore) voltage, DDR3 at 1.65V and slight increases to the southbridge and IO voltages to match. A solid 4GHz is not to be sniffed at - it's the benchmark we set all performance boards to achieve, however over the 200MHz base clock the system continually reset itself at ~210MHz and bluescreened at 205MHz and under with a 20x mutliplier.

With a 12x multiplier 210MHz was achievable on the base clock, but nothing other that would result in a successful POST.

The CPU and Memory Level Up profiles are handy extras for easy of OC, and the keyboard TweakIT function allows the end user to inch up the clock speed at 0.2MHz at a time within the OS even. That's the one great thing about Asus RoG boards - whether you're complete novice or hardcore overclocker, there are options to suit all tastes. Naturally we prefer to set the BIOS to manual under "Extreme OC" and get full control.

Power Consumption

At idle it's not a particularly low power board, despite the fact it uses fewer power phases and has less actual board to power than almost all of the other boards featured. Despite the fact Asus includes an EPU chip on it, we don't think it does much at all here and turning it on/off in the BIOS (selecting Full Phase or Normal does this) didn't make a blind bit of difference. Even at full load it pulls a fair bit of juice compared to Gigabyte and MSI boards - even without their DES or GreenPower enabled. Unfortunately, despite being a little board it's not equally short on power draw, however since an RoG board is an overclocker and gamer at heart, throwing the juice down the CPU and graphics card certainly won't help save the pennies. If you care!