Final Words & Conclusion
Final Words & Conclusion
What an interesting little motherboard. It offers the brute power of the LGA 1366 Intel Core i7 platform, you can combine it with triple channel memory (dual works fine as well of course) and you get to play with the coolness from the ROG team.
Now when we tested this motherboard, all was fine .. yet we could not get our Core i7 965 over 3.85 GHz. Despite using an older C0 revision processor with some limitation we did honestly expect at least a 4 GHz overclock. After checking the System BIOS (once the test work was finished) we noticed an outdated BIOS from June, when we popped in the latest firmware our prayers had been heard ... we simply flicked the CPU Level UP function in the BIOS and it was running at 4 GHz. From there on it is all trial and error of course. Apply some nice water-cooling and your score could be higher, our overclocked ended at that 4 GHz though, but that was with a heatpipe based cooler and thus the old revision/stepping Core i7 965.
Now, despite a spicy price tag this is a motherboard targeted at the more 'mainstream' targeted X58 end-user and it's not that much different compared to lower segmented X58 motherboards from ASUS. It is obvious that ASUS tried to fully utilize the Intel chipset as much as it can aside from the primary features (to cut cost). The design, USB 3.0 and SATA 6G are the primary factors combined create a very decent and nice motherboard without adding many other ICs.
The Rampage III GENE offers nearly everything you can wish for on a X58 motherboard though, for an enthusiast end user that is. We can moan about smaller features like a lacking 2nd Ethernet jack and some more back-panel connectivity but at 210 EUR we just really can not complain either.
You are making a choice with mATX though, only so much fits on a motherboard with a smaller form factor. Regardless of that you can still go multi graphics cards (two cards) in SLI or Crossfire and have a very spicy processor running in your PC with triple channel memory.
Overall baseline performance was good, with some random occurrences here and there of course. We notice that there is plenty of bandwidth for the USB 3.0 and SATA3 6G controllers as their respective performance is really good.
The Rampage III GENE X58 based motherboard is good with decent feature set, nice performance, good tweakability and definitely an appealing design. With the ROG treatment you get to play around with a lot more overclocking options in the BIOS yet also through ROG Connect and that in combo with the sheer performance, USB 2.0 and SATA 6G makes this a very viable motherboard for the heavy duty gamer that wants to carry around light-weight PC to their LANtastic frag fests ...
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