Intel i7 3960X EE / Asus Rampage IV Extreme / Corsair GTX8 (2400mhz) / Quad GTX590 Review

Asus are using a colourful red UEFI interface for the Rampage IV Extreme, which is just as impressive as the one incorporated with the Asus P9X79 Deluxe reviewed in a separate article today. We received several updates for the motherboard during our review and had to recheck some of the results.

The advanced panel is well configured and is intuitive to get around. The monitor panel is self explanatory and allows for analysis of temperatures and voltage settings.

The Rampage IV Extreme has several settings for automatic overclocked settings including one with a higher voltage setting. The ‘normal' OC profile overclocks the processor to 4375mhz with a slight voltage increase. The ‘extreme' OC profile attempts an overclock to almost 5ghz. We would recommend manual overclocking, ignoring these settings.

There are a wide array of voltage settings at the bottom of this panel, and these are supplemented with the Digi Power options in a dedicated section of the bios.

The memory settings can be manually adjusted, and we had good success in this panel, when paired up with the Corsair Dominator GT memory, tuning the timings manually to 10-12-10-30 @ 2400mhz. Additionally, we increased the voltage to 1.65V.

The latest version of the Rampage IV Extreme bios, released a few days before launch correctly configured our Corsair 2,400mhz memory via the XMP profile.

We managed to get the system booting at 5ghz with some tweaking, although as with the P9X79 Deluxe board, it required around 1.5 volts+ which resulted in very high load temperatures, not a realistic long term situation.

Interestingly, our Core i7 3960X EE sample was stable at 4.7ghz with only 1.41 volts and many of the settings on automatic. We only had one sample at hand so are unable to compare against others. We are sure that 5.0ghz and higher is possible 24/7, with better, more expensive cooling.

System validation at 4.8ghz is available here.

System validation at 4.9ghz is available here.

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