FRONTPAGE ASUS Rampage IV Black Edition Motherboard Review

[Overclockers.com]

The phrase "top of the line" can often be a loosely used term when describing a product. In the case of the Rampage IV Black Edition motherboard, ASUS makes no bones about it being just that. There have been several improvements made to enhance this X79 based board since the the Rampage IV Extreme was released a little over a year ago. Most importantly perhaps is the optimized design to fully support the new Ivy Bridge-E socket 2011 processors.

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[Ajay57]

Very nice review and it looks impressive, but a $400 Dollar Mobo with no cooling on the chipset!! Did i see that with my poor old eye's or am i wrong in saying this hmmm.

Respectfully,

AJ.

 

[Tyerker]

Do the X79 chips need to be cooled that badly unless you're pushing DDR3 2500 or 6 GHz?

 

[hokiealumnus]

No chipset cooling? What's that big fat chunk of aluminum on the corner there?

 

[Ajay57]

Maybe as i said i got mixed up there Hokie, with this statment.

I went ahead and removed the ROG illuminated block so you could see under it; but as stated above, it doesn’t actually cool anything.

Probably looking at the wrong picture!!

 

[EarthDog]

Do the X79 chips need to be cooled that badly unless you're pushing DDR3 2500 or 6 GHz?

The chipset doesn't have much if anything to do with ram. The IMC is on the CPU. Its the power use of that CPU in general that the VRM's (not the chipset) need to be cooled.

I think Ajay just has his parts confused. I am not entirely sure what lights up but everything that needs cooled is clearly being cooled. I think the I/O area lights up and possibly the ROG thing in the middle. The PCH(chipset) cooler looks passive (no lighting). Things get confusing when you call a spade a garden weasel.

 

[Ajay57]

Or you smell a RAT lol!!

 

[Lvcoyote]

Only the ROG emblem in the middle lights up. But there are a few LED's under the I/O area that light up as well. All of these can be controlled in the UEFI BIOS.

 

[Woomack]

Did you have any memory stability issues with [email protected] ? I'm just asking as most of the tests after OC are on dual channel memory even though there are full 16GB visible.

 

[Lvcoyote]

No, not that I'm aware of. I never touched the memory settings after initially setting them to their rated voltage/timings/speeds. They should have been running quad-channel the whole time.

 

[Woomack]

AIDA64 result is clearly showing that bandwidth is 50% lower after OC to 4.6GHz so something isn't right.

 

[Lvcoyote]

Oh, I see what you're saying. CPU-Z is showing dual channel at the overclocked sppeds but also reports all 16 GB of memory. Probably just a CPU-Z bug. If it recognizes all 16 GB of memory, I'd assume it really running quad channel...... interesting.

 

[Lvcoyote]

AIDA64 result is clearly showing that bandwidth is 50% lower after OC to 4.6GHz so something isn't right.

Hmm.... you're right.... I'll have to investigate that. Thanks for the keen eye! I'll let you know what I find out there.

 

[Lvcoyote]

Ok Woomack,
I have no flipping idea what happened during the review, but I set the system back up and loaded the same overclocking profile I used during the review..... Now it shows quad channel......LOL.

Gotta love computers!! Again, thanks for the keen eye!!

 

[Woomack]

During last benching on dice I had triple channel memory but 16GB in total. Then was some moisture in the socket ( 3-4 pins only ). After drying and cleaning cpu pads all was working fine. I doubt it's the issue for your rig

 

[EarthDog]

So, did the AIDA results overclocked show what they should?

 

[Woomack]

7-Zip, x264, POV Ray results were on quad channel , Spi 1/32M, Cinebench 11.5/15, wprime and AIDA64 were on dual channel mode. From these benchmarks almost only AIDA64 and Spi32M will show much better results in quad channel.

I actually noticed that dual channel issue while checking write bandwidth in AIDA64. My MSI X79A-GD45 Plus has some weird bandwidth issue and to make correct results at higher clocked memory, I have to use x1.25 strap or writes are lower that they should.
In this review I see that stock DDR3-1866 results are really good at 100MHz bclk. It just proves that my board is just weird

I was thinking to buy RIV Black but price in local stores is just too high and it won't guarantee me much better OC results. Maybe higher memory clock but it can give me only slightly better results in benchmarks so I spent my money on GTX780 DC2 .

 

[Lvcoyote]

So, did the AIDA results overclocked show what they should?

Nope, even though the memory shows running in quad channel now, the results are actually worse than what I saw when dual channel. Down in the 15xxx range now....LOL.

I'm going to fire off an e-mail to ASUS and see if they have any clue about what is going on here.... something is amiss for sure.

 

[Lvcoyote]

Ok, I finally figured out what was going on.....



There is a BIOS setting called RAW MHz in the DRAM Timings area of BIOS. It's intended for times when you're trying to get insane memory speeds, but the guide I have says it come with a drop in performance. I think I enabled that when I was toying around with memory overclocking and forgot to disable it..... ooops!

All is well in RIVBE land now....