ASUS Rampage II Extreme @ [H]

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FrgMstr

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ASUS Rampage II Extreme - ASUS adds another Republic of Gamers branded motherboard. The Rampage II Extreme, hopefully a worthy successor to its predecessor, comes to us packed with innovative features supporting Intel's new Core i7 processors. ASUS promises that this board was designed for overclockers.

This is one of those polarizing products. You probably already know if you love it, or if you hate it. You know if you want it or wouldn’t touch it. You know if you understand what all the features are actually for, or you don’t.
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droooooooooool This thing looks amazing :) Love the review and the video. Keep up the good work kyle!
 
Nice review but I will stick with my p6t deluxe that I have already.. just need to get that dam adapter from thermalright!!!
 
Very nice board indeed. Though it gave me comfort knowing that the P6T I ordered will be able to OC on air about as well as this, for about $150 less (last I priced both boards). Great review & more vids plz!
 
I really enjoyed working with the Rampage II Extreme. So much so that this will probably be my next upgrade. I'll probably combine it with a Core i7 940.
 
runudownquick said:
Very nice board indeed. Though it gave me comfort knowing that the P6T I ordered will be able to OC on air about as well as this, for about $150 less (last I priced both boards). Great review & more vids plz!
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Unless you want high ram speeds and need to boost your qpi/imc voltage above 1.4v. That's the main thing pushing me towards the R2E instead of the P6T.

I'd like to be able to use an X-Fi Titanium sound card in the top pciex1 slot, but it looks like a trivial mod to fix the X58 heatsink on the R2E to allow that.
 
I'm actually looking forward to the Gigabyte x58 board being released, has a few more tricks like 10 SATA ports, 12 USB ports and some other stuff that looked promising (crap load of heatpiping and fins around the northbridge, possibly cheaper than the Asus comparison).

Just one question though, did the backplate for the Thermalright come with the board or was that something you got special, only found one listed LGA1366 compatible cooler on newegg and it looks no different than the stock intel heatsink?
 
440.00 thats actually somewhat similiar to the other Asus high end boards, still a little ridonkulous imo but seems nice, would like to have seen water on the x58/mosfets for that money though no ?
 
Great review and a great board!

I've got a few questions about the sound card that came with the board: were there any problems with it and did you use an Asus driver or a Creative driver?

There are a lot of problems with Creative cards under Vista and I'm curious if Creative fixed them or they are still selling the same crap and won't bother with making good drivers.

Thx!
 
now that the memory controller is on the chip, there doesn't seem to be a huge difference between boards except for overclocking potential and extra features.

ill be buying the cheapest gigabyte board i can find.
 
PAo_ReVoLT said:
is there a video version too?

or you are talking the sneak peak one?

anyway this is very sexy board
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Yea, I meant the sneak peak video. I also just watched the P6T OC video and am quite amazed at the ease of OCing, especially with having all 6 DIMMs filled.
 
Outamyhead said:
Just one question though, did the backplate for the Thermalright come with the board or was that something you got special, only found one listed LGA1366 compatible cooler on newegg and it looks no different than the stock intel heatsink?
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That heatsink was furnished by Intel.
 
Outamyhead said:
I'm actually looking forward to the Gigabyte x58 board being released, has a few more tricks like 10 SATA ports, 12 USB ports and some other stuff that looked promising (crap load of heatpiping and fins around the northbridge, possibly cheaper than the Asus comparison).

Just one question though, did the backplate for the Thermalright come with the board or was that something you got special, only found one listed LGA1366 compatible cooler on newegg and it looks no different than the stock intel heatsink?
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The LGA1366 mounting hardware came with the heatsink. It did not come with the board.
 
mufcfan said:
Great review and a great board!

I've got a few questions about the sound card that came with the board: were there any problems with it and did you use an Asus driver or a Creative driver?

There are a lot of problems with Creative cards under Vista and I'm curious if Creative fixed them or they are still selling the same crap and won't bother with making good drivers.

Thx!
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I used the driver that came on the ASUS driver DVD.

Sojuuk said:
now that the memory controller is on the chip, there doesn't seem to be a huge difference between boards except for overclocking potential and extra features.

ill be buying the cheapest gigabyte board i can find.
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Precisely. That's been the case with AMD processor compatible boards and that has been the case to a large degree on the Intel side even preceeding now. Granted at lower resolutions and with synthetic tests we've seen "performance differences" but nothing is really any different in the real world. Especially not where gaming is concerned because the GPU is the most limiting factor in terms of your performance.

Proteos said:
Yea, I meant the sneak peak video. I also just watched the P6T OC video and am quite amazed at the ease of OCing, especially with having all 6 DIMMs filled.
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Indeed. I find this quite exciting as well.
 
Very sick board. However the price will keep me from touching it... probably. Ya never know, sometimes I break down and buy these things. :)
 
vengence said:
Very sick board. However the price will keep me from touching it... probably. Ya never know, sometimes I break down and buy these things. :)
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Well I'm picking this one over the ASUS P6T Deluxe because the ASUS Rampage II Extreme has 3-Way SLI support. Otherwise I'd say it wasn't worth the cost over the afore mentioned ASUS P6T Deluxe. With that said the ASUS Rampage II Extreme is quite awesome and really, its' the one to beat in my mind.
 
Dan_D said:
Well I'm picking this one over the ASUS P6T Deluxe because the ASUS Rampage II Extreme has 3-Way SLI support. Otherwise I'd say it wasn't worth the cost over the afore mentioned ASUS P6T Deluxe. With that said the ASUS Rampage II Extreme is quite awesome and really, its' the one to beat in my mind.
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I am a little curious, though in the review ya'll said:
Review said:
The X58 chipset supports SLI natively so no added NVIDIA chips are present on the board.
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But I thought...


NVIDIA SLI on Intel X58 Chipset Mobos Article said:
You will be able to use NVIDIA SLIx2 (x3 and x4 with additional NVIDIA NF200 logic) video card configurations natively on Intel’s upcoming X58 chipset motherboards that support Nehalem processors on motherboards that have been SLI certified. The slides below tell the tale.
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Ok, while writing this I found this...

NVIDIA SLI on Intel X58 Chipset Mobos Article said:
UPDATE: I spoke a bit wrong above about x3 and x4 SLI, those modes will be done natively on the X58 as shown in the slides, but would have to divvy up the PCIe bandwidth of the single X58 chipset between cards. For the board to run in a true PCIe x16 SLI X 3 or SLI X 4 configuration, an additional NF 200 chipset would be needed per card.
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So just to confirm, this board does not have a NF200 on it, right? That's kind of disapointing to be honest. While I know PCI-Ex8 isn't quite saturated yet, I wouldn't be surpised if it was by the next gen of graphics cards.
 
"The R2E is built specifically for that guy that wants to extend his e-penis with something that is a bit more impactful than a TypeR sticker."

AWESOME QUOTE! OMG! When I see a '96 Accord with a motorcycle exhaust and a TypeR sticker, all I do is laugh.
 
vengence said:
I am a little curious, though in the review ya'll said:


But I thought...





Ok, while writing this I found this...



So just to confirm, this board does not have a NF200 on it, right? That's kind of disapointing to be honest. While I know PCI-Ex8 isn't quite saturated yet, I wouldn't be surpised if it was by the next gen of graphics cards.
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Actually I don't think that is dissappointing at all. Sure you can't run 3x16 PCI-Express slots at full speeds but the nForce 200 chips may very well add additional latency to the board as well as heat. That was a complaint I read about some manufacturers making prior to the release of the X58 chipset based boards. Plus there is the added cost of the nForce 200 chip itself. None of those are things you want. Really since you can do regular SLI using two video cards or Quad-SLI using only two slots I wouldn't worry about the bandwidth constraints. Bear in mind that the recent cards are all PCI-Express 2.0 and that PCI-Express 2.0 capable motherboards like this one provide just as much bandwidth as PCI-Express 1.0 in half the lanes. So again, I don't think this is an issue. I seriously doubt you'll see many boards with nForce 200 MCP's on them going forward. I find it even more doubtful that there will be any loss in performance running 3-Way SLI on an X58 chipset based board compared to a 790i Ultra SLI board.

In fact thanks to Core i7 you may get more performance with the X58 chipset running 3-Way SLI as there is some evidence out there to suggest that multi-GPU configurations scale better on Core i7 then they do on Core 2 or Phenom processor based systems.
 
Dan_D said:
Actually I don't think that is dissappointing at all. Sure you can't run 3x16 PCI-Express slots at full speeds but the nForce 200 chips may very well add additional latency to the board as well as heat. That was a complaint I read about some manufacturers making prior to the release of the X58 chipset based boards. Plus there is the added cost of the nForce 200 chip itself. None of those are things you want. Really since you can do regular SLI using two video cards or Quad-SLI using only two slots I wouldn't worry about the bandwidth constraints. Bear in mind that the recent cards are all PCI-Express 2.0 and that PCI-Express 2.0 capable motherboards like this one provide just as much bandwidth as PCI-Express 1.0 in half the lanes. So again, I don't think this is an issue. I seriously doubt you'll see many boards with nForce 200 MCP's on them going forward. I find it even more doubtful that there will be any loss in performance running 3-Way SLI on an X58 chipset based board compared to a 790i Ultra SLI board.

In fact thanks to Core i7 you may get more performance with the X58 chipset running 3-Way SLI as there is some evidence out there to suggest that multi-GPU configurations scale better on Core i7 then they do on Core 2 or Phenom processor based systems.
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I'll agree with the latency possibly being a problem. To be honest, I'm getting a little above my paygrade with this talk. :p

I've never been one to be concerned with the added heat/power. I can't imagine it being more than 20 watts at an absolute maximum which relative to the 200 Watt overclocked CPU and 3 200+ Watt GPUs we would be talking, it just doesn't sound like a problem.

As far as cost, I think I heard it was a 5$ chip somewhere.

We'll have to wait and see I think. I'll be interested in the numbers, but I have to admit I had forgotten about the PCI-E 2.0 doubling the lane bandwidth so perhaps it won't be an issue.
 
Dan_D said:
Actually I don't think that is dissappointing at all. Sure you can't run 3x16 PCI-Express slots at full speeds but the nForce 200 chips may very well add additional latency to the board as well as heat. That was a complaint I read about some manufacturers making prior to the release of the X58 chipset based boards. Plus there is the added cost of the nForce 200 chip itself. None of those are things you want. Really since you can do regular SLI using two video cards or Quad-SLI using only two slots I wouldn't worry about the bandwidth constraints. Bear in mind that the recent cards are all PCI-Express 2.0 and that PCI-Express 2.0 capable motherboards like this one provide just as much bandwidth as PCI-Express 1.0 in half the lanes. So again, I don't think this is an issue. I seriously doubt you'll see many boards with nForce 200 MCP's on them going forward. I find it even more doubtful that there will be any loss in performance running 3-Way SLI on an X58 chipset based board compared to a 790i Ultra SLI board.

In fact thanks to Core i7 you may get more performance with the X58 chipset running 3-Way SLI as there is some evidence out there to suggest that multi-GPU configurations scale better on Core i7 then they do on Core 2 or Phenom processor based systems.
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Makes sense, although I hope we can see some test, from [H] preferably, showing gains or no gains with an nf200 mcp on a x58 board, like the Asus P6T6 WS Revolution perhaps?
 
Are you able to use the pci 1x slot if you have anything other than a single slot video card??
 
Bigbacon said:
Are you able to use the pci 1x slot if you have anything other than a single slot video card??
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It is a PCIe x1 slot, so whatever x1 card you have that is compatible will go in any PCIe slot. It is not just an "audio card slot" like some of the others we have seen in the past.
 
My X-FI Elite has been working just dandy for many, many months now. Most of the year in fact.

mufcfan said:
Great review and a great board!

I've got a few questions about the sound card that came with the board: were there any problems with it and did you use an Asus driver or a Creative driver?

There are a lot of problems with Creative cards under Vista and I'm curious if Creative fixed them or they are still selling the same crap and won't bother with making good drivers.

Thx!
Click to expand...
 
I use the onboard sound installed on ALL the motherboards we test and it has been a long time since I had issues with any of them. I think the biggest thing about using them is the Mic input and we cover that. Outside of that, audiophiles are the ones that need be concerned with descrete cards IMO.
 
Hi guys, great review. Unfortunately it leeves me rather torn. I will be upgrading my system some time between Xmas and fathers day and most of the parts i plan on purchasing are already set in my mind. I will purchase the inexpensive core i920 6gb corsair ram and 2 evga gtx280's.

Motherboards
I have only owned ABIT motherboards since the bh6 and i like to buy the best for my situation, and as i have gotten older I find that i don't have the time or the inklination to get that last 10 megahertz out of my system, I just want a nice ease comfortable over clock and no LN2! : ).
That being said I really like the ASUS Rampage II Extreme but being i am only going to run 2xsli I don't really need it, so I was wondering how the over-clocking of the low end i7 on the rampage2 compared to the deluxe for most performance and ease of over-clocking.

great review
rody

ps what is [h]ardocp's favorate case to work with?
 
So how will the Rampage II Extreme be compared to Asus P6T6 WS Revolution?
The Asus P5E64 WS Evolution was more solid and stable than the Asus Rampage Formula / Extreme..

What's the differences between the two?
Which one do you think will be the most solid and stable one?

Looking forward for [H] to get their hands on the Asus P6T6 WS Revolution!
 
RamGuy said:
So how will the Rampage II Extreme be compared to Asus P6T6 WS Revolution?
The Asus P5E64 WS Evolution was more solid and stable than the Asus Rampage Formula / Extreme..

What's the differences between the two?
Which one do you think will be the most solid and stable one?

Looking forward for [H] to get their hands on the Asus P6T6 WS Revolution!
Click to expand...

I don't know. I haven't worked with the latter board. If I ever get my hands on one I'll let you know. Part of the deal may just be features and who it is marketed to. The Rampage II Extreme obviously targets the gamer and the hard core overclocking enthusiast. I just saw a picture of the Asus P6T6 WS Revolution and damn is that sexy. Tons of PCI-Express slots, a nice color scheme. Not sure but the cooling looks like it might be inferior to the Rampage II Extreme's cooling solution. I'd have to get it in my hands to know for certain. Looks like they both have 16-phase power, 3-phase for the memory and 3-phase for the north bridge. I see Realtek 8111C LAN on the work station board (vomit) and I see Marvell for the extra SATA ports. (Which beats the JMicron controller.) It has an awesome layout though. I definitely prefer the expansion slots setup of the workstation board. Especially since I hate PCI slots.
 
Well, I have a really hard time figuring out which Nehalem motherboard to go for..
Money is no issue, it's just that I want the most rock solid and stable board, with the most stable and reliable BIOS etc..

I've had so many issues with my system the past two years, so this time I want nothing to go wrong!

And boards marketing as "Workstation" boards gives me the feeling of the focus being on making the board as stable and reliable as possible. The Maximus / Rampage series have also had all this "bling-bling" and lots of useless stuff added to the cards, some of the BIOS versions have been that great etc.. And the as mention the Asus Evolution board was indeed more stable and reliable than the Rampage Formula / Extreme.

When it comes to the features, the controllers on the P6T6 WS Revolution seems to be a bit better than the Rampage II Extreme whom got some really cheap controllers in the first place. JMicron and Marvell network controller on such an expansive board?! I'm sure that the Marvell SATA / RAID controller on the P6T6 Rev beats the JMicron on the Rampage II Extreme, and the Realtek controller sure beats the Marvell network controller, but that doesn't count much for me.. Hell yeah I care a lot about the controllers, and it's a real shame how such expansive boards can have that cheap controllers, but that's why I've already got my own PCI-Ex Intel NIC and as I only got 3x SATA drives they will be connected to the Intel ICH10R southbridge and nowhere near that JMicron / Marvell SATA / RAID controller.

So the differences between the Rampage II Extreme and the P6T6 Rev for me would be the nF200 chip (which might not actually be a good thing? as I'm only going to run 2x cards in SLi the added latency of the nF200 will make things worse than with the Rampage II Extreme nF100 chip?), the BIOS and the overall quality of the board?

I've always had this feeling about the Rampage / Maximus boards being more about the visuals, some added "bling-bling" etc.. than actual quality?
 
Rody said:
Hi guys, great review. Unfortunately it leeves me rather torn. I will be upgrading my system some time between Xmas and fathers day and most of the parts i plan on purchasing are already set in my mind. I will purchase the inexpensive core i920 6gb corsair ram and 2 evga gtx280's.

Motherboards
I have only owned ABIT motherboards since the bh6 and i like to buy the best for my situation, and as i have gotten older I find that i don't have the time or the inklination to get that last 10 megahertz out of my system, I just want a nice ease comfortable over clock and no LN2! : ).
That being said I really like the ASUS Rampage II Extreme but being i am only going to run 2xsli I don't really need it, so I was wondering how the over-clocking of the low end i7 on the rampage2 compared to the deluxe for most performance and ease of over-clocking.

great review
rody

ps what is [h]ardocp's favorate case to work with?
Click to expand...

My favorite case right now is the Silverstone TJ09B. As for the overclocking with the Core i7 920 and 940 I can't say. I only used the 965 Extreme Edition with the test board.
 
omg Asus P6T6 WS Revolution :drool:

my wife saw a picture of it and told me to stop looking at porn. :(

Why am I dreaming of 6-280s for CUDA? That would be really, really, really, sick...
 
RamGuy said:
Well, I have a really hard time figuring out which Nehalem motherboard to go for..
Money is no issue, it's just that I want the most rock solid and stable board, with the most stable and reliable BIOS etc..

I've had so many issues with my system the past two years, so this time I want nothing to go wrong!

And boards marketing as "Workstation" boards gives me the feeling of the focus being on making the board as stable and reliable as possible. The Maximus / Rampage series have also had all this "bling-bling" and lots of useless stuff added to the cards, some of the BIOS versions have been that great etc.. And the as mention the Asus Evolution board was indeed more stable and reliable than the Rampage Formula / Extreme.

When it comes to the features, the controllers on the P6T6 WS Revolution seems to be a bit better than the Rampage II Extreme whom got some really cheap controllers in the first place. JMicron and Marvell network controller on such an expansive board?! I'm sure that the Marvell SATA / RAID controller on the P6T6 Rev beats the JMicron on the Rampage II Extreme, and the Realtek controller sure beats the Marvell network controller, but that doesn't count much for me.. Hell yeah I care a lot about the controllers, and it's a real shame how such expansive boards can have that cheap controllers, but that's why I've already got my own PCI-Ex Intel NIC and as I only got 3x SATA drives they will be connected to the Intel ICH10R southbridge and nowhere near that JMicron / Marvell SATA / RAID controller.

So the differences between the Rampage II Extreme and the P6T6 Rev for me would be the nF200 chip (which might not actually be a good thing? as I'm only going to run 2x cards in SLi the added latency of the nF200 will make things worse than with the Rampage II Extreme nF100 chip?), the BIOS and the overall quality of the board?

I've always had this feeling about the Rampage / Maximus boards being more about the visuals, some added "bling-bling" etc.. than actual quality?
Click to expand...

The Rampage II Extreme has no nForce series chip on it. Be glad it doesn't have an nForce 100 MCP. Those only do PCI-Express 1.0. The quality of the boards should be on par with one another but the workstation version may or may not be more stable. The Rampage II Extreme is as stable as any board I've ever seen so I doubt that the workstation board will be any better. The Rampage II Extreme will probably overclock better but I can't guarantee that until I get my hands on the workstation board. That is if I ever get a chance to. As for the JMicron vs. Marvell RAID controller comparison, well they are both roughly about the same. The main difference is that the BIOS and drive compatibility of the JMicron controller is outright crap. There are more BIOS issues with the JMicron RAID BIOS. Further more its' horrid for regular PATA drives as well. Its' really, really bad about that. The Marvell controller is better in that regard, but its' not even as good as the ICH10R. Though if you really care about drive controllers and putting together a serious RAID array I'd stay away from the ICH10R too. There are MUCH better solutions out there. They just aren't cheap.

Onboard hardware has always been, and for the most part always will suck compared to dedicated add-in boards. The nForce, Marvell, Realtek and even the Intel onboard NICs are all slow and all use too much in the way of CPU cycles when you compare them to a real network card. Still, the Intel card is easily the best of the bunch, probably followed by Marvell, then the nForce then the Realtek. They are all fast enough for the internet and that's mainly what people care about.

As for the last part, no. The Republic of Gamer's boards have all been virtually problem free and totally painless to work with. I've enjoyed working with all of them with the exception of the Striker Extreme and the Striker II Formula. Both of which I own. They have the best quality of all of ASUS' motherboards sans the workstation boards which I've never actually worked with. The ROG boards get the best chipset cooling, the most features and some of them are quite innovative. They are all great overclockers. Not necessarily the best but each one of them has been super easy to OC. On automatic settings you'd be surprised what they can do. In the hands of a seasoned overclocker they are even better. Again not the BEST, but certainly amongst the most reliable and problem free offerings. Unfortunately they are all wallet breakers in their respective classes. Even their P965, P35 and P45 offerings are all insanely high in price compared to other companies, and even ASUS' lesser offerings. The Forumla boards are high priced as well, but those are the cheaper and lower end of the ROG line. The ROG Extreme boards are the ones that pretty much rape your bank account. Are they worth it? Well I have mixed feelings on that. The prices sure are high but I've usually preffered the ROG boards to most other boards I've worked with.
 
Dan_D said:
Though if you really care about drive controllers and putting together a serious RAID array I'd stay away from the ICH10R too. There are MUCH better solutions out there. They just aren't cheap.
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I've been very interested in purchasing an add-in raid card but there are many choices and I thought I saw a review that proved them to have much higher latencies than the onboard controllers which slowed them down in the things I like to do. Like gaming.

Just to add my 2 cents on the new mainborad subject. I'll definately be going for the R2E. I have a M2F now and love that. There is also that second GTX280 I have waiting in the wings.
 
eeekman said:
I've been very interested in purchasing an add-in raid card but there are many choices and I thought I saw a review that proved them to have much higher latencies than the onboard controllers which slowed them down in the things I like to do. Like gaming.

Just to add my 2 cents on the new mainborad subject. I'll definately be going for the R2E. I have a M2F now and love that. There is also that second GTX280 I have waiting in the wings.
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I bought one the other day on a whim to replace one that kicked the bucket. Have not installed it yet though.
 
No, will not be reviewing it. Bought it to do RAID1 only.
 
How come you say the board is perfect then pick out what seem to be important issues with the expansion slots and headers and stuff?
 
suj said:
How come you say the board is perfect then pick out what seem to be important issues with the expansion slots and headers and stuff?
Click to expand...

No the P6T is the one that I have real issues with concerning the layout. I'd prefer that they moved the PCI-Express x16 slots all up one position on the Rampage II Extreme but that's a minor gripe as it is still fully usable for 3-Way SLI. I tested this.
 
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