Asus Rampage III Black Edition Review

Testing Methods

As the Rampage III Black Edition is an extreme overclocking motherboard, we've tweaked our regular test setup to provide the turbo-nutters with the results in which they would be most interested. Our tests included our regular run of Media Benchmarks, covering image editing, video editing and multi tasking, and we also obtained results using WPrime 1.55, SuperPi 1.5, 3DMark Vantage and 3DMark 11.

We've also ramped up our usual set of hardware. If you're pushing the limits to the extreme, air-cooling is clearly going to fall short and even standard water-cooling could end up being the bottleneck that prevents you obtaining that world record. With this in mind, we've enlisted the help of our Hailea HC-500A water chiller to achieve sub-ambient cooling. This allowed us to overclock the CPU from 3.33GHz to 4.738GHz rather than the 4.4GHz limit we hit on air-cooling.

Test setup:

• 3.3GHz Intel Core i7-980X
  
• Hailea HC-500A water chiller
  
• Laing D5 Pump
  
• Swiftech Apogee XT waterblock
  
• 6GB Corsair Dominator XT 2,000MHz DDR3 Memory
  
• 256GB Crucial RealSSD C300 SSD
  
• 4x AMD Radeon HD 5870 1GB Graphics cards
  
• Windows 7 64-bit, Catalyst 10.6 WHQL and 11.2 WHQL
  
• Intel inf 9.1.1.1025

Overclocked settings:

• Rampage III Extreme 4.784GHz, 23x multiplier, 208MHz QPI, 2,000MHz triple-channel DDR3 memory at 9-9-9-24-1T, CPU vcore 1,525V, DRAM 1.65V, QPI/DRAM Core voltage 1.375V, CPU PLL 1.96V IOH voltage 1.47075V, ICH voltage 1.36475V
  
• Rampage III Black Edition 4.738GHz, 23x multiplier, 206MHz QPI, 2,000MHz triple-channel DDR3 memory at 9-9-9-24-1T, CPU vcore 1,5375V, DRAM 1.65625V, QPI/DRAM Core voltage 1.375V, CPU PLL 1.961V IOH voltage 1.47075V, ICH voltage 1.36475V