14 DAY TRIAL // Since Intel’s Core i7 chips made it to the headlines with architectural details and their overclocking capabilities, news on optimal platforms that allow users to leverage speed and, as an effect, the performance of the processors, also came up soon enough. Quite a few makers have already been reported to launch X58 motherboards to fit with the new Nehalem processors. One of these makers is ASUS.
The Rampage II Extreme is a motherboard ASUS designed to push the user's experience to a maximum when it is coupled with a Core i7 chip. Besides, it’s a well known fact that ASUS usually enhances the overclocking capabilities of its high-end and gaming motherboards so as to push the hardware to the limit. Enthusiasts are always happy to put their hands on a machine with great potential, and this motherboard promises a lot.
We have already reported that the upcoming Core i7 965 Extreme Edition CPU has nice overclocking features and that its speed can be easily boosted to 4.0GHz through different methods. According to the guys from vr-zone, the frequency of the processor can be leveraged without having to rise the voltage. On an ASUS Rampage II Extreme motherboard, things go really easy when overclocking.
The ASUS board has a lot of BIOS features which allow users to mess around with multipliers, voltage ranges and other settings to speed up the CPU. Of course, the chip needs to be cooled with a more serious cooling system than the stock one, but all is doable. The guys from vr-zone say they tried out a few different setting combinations, and the most suitable one for them proved to be 210MHz base clock x 19.0 multiplier, yielding a nice 4GHz clock speed.
To make it work stable at the 210MHz base clock, QPI/DRAM voltage and IOH voltage were slightly bumped up, but all other voltages were left at their default levels. When testing a “slightly overclocked setup”, which also included a 3-way SLI GTX280, they managed to score P34027 in 3DMark Vantage. The system was also able to deliver “over 100 FPS in Far Cry 2 'Ultra Quality' settings at 2560x1600 resolution”.