Overclocking

Our retail Core i9-7900X has proven to be a rather good chip, usually needing less than 1.2V to hit 4.6GHz. The Rampage needed just 1.16V to get there, which is the lowest we've seen from any X299 board, while the CPU itself sat in the high 80s in terms of temperature after a 10 minute stress test.

Stepping up to our Core i9-7980XE, and apart from the heatsinks not breaking a sweat, it happily sat at 4.5GHz, although we needed the usual 1.18V to get there.

Performance Analysis

Firstly, we should mention that we've retired some of our old HEDT motherboard test kit, specifically our pair of RX 480s, and we're now using a GTX 1080 across all our board testing. This means that a few tests, namely power and gaming, aren't comparable, so we've omitted them. 

The content creation benchmarks that were comparable showed a typical set of results for our CPU with nothing outstanding at stock speed or when overclocked. Overclocking yielded some handy boosts, though, such as the Cinebench score rising from 2,177 to 2,457. Far Cry 5 benefited from the overclock too with the minimum frame rate rising from 80fps to 91fps.

The audio performance initially failed to impress with a much worse result than the seemingly identical ROG Zenith Extreme Alpha. In the end we found we needed to fire up the Realtek audio console and set the amplification to extreme, which resulted in near identical results to the Zenith and chart-topping audio performance too. One area of concern was power consumption, because at idle stock speed, the board drew 126W rising to 150W when overclocked. We even swapped PSUs to see if something was up there but got practically the same readings. Compared to 85W and 133W for the MSI X299M Gaming Pro Carbon AC, this does seem a bit high, yet all we'd done is set the XMP profile in the BIOS.The overclocked results were less of a worry, as we've seen other boards top 300W at stock speed and 400W when overclocked, plus we're not dealing with a run of the mill board here either.

Conclusion

We're definitely impressed by the Rampage VI Extreme Omega, although it's shame that to really nail the X299 platform and Intel's 18-core CPUs we've had to wait so long and spend so much. At £600, this is one very expensive motherboard, especially as the MSI MEG X299 Creation, which we used in our review of the Core i9-9980XE, seemed to handle Intel's flagship fine and costs £100 less.

We can't deny the sheer extravagance, here though, from the easy-access DIMM.2 module and fan expansion card to the RGB lighting and water-cooling support, plus it seems Asus has really succeeded in the power delivery department too. Not everyone's wallets will reach this far, but if money were no object and we wanted to build a suitably crazy X299 system, this is probably the board we'd buy.