ASUS Rampage III Formula

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Overclockers Club has just posted a review of the ASUS Rampage III Formula today. The OCC gang seemed to really like the board and recommend it to enthusiasts and overclockers alike. You can see our review here for comparison purposes.

As an ROG series board the expectation is that this motherboard is going to deliver great overclocking results. In this case, the motherboard did meet and exceed that expectation with an overclock of 4269MHz. To reach this overclock, the base clock was bumped up to 203MHz and the multiplier to 21. This was a little easier on the voltages needed than running at 215MHz x 20. While the CPU I have is a decent clocking DO stepping, it does need some voltage to get above 4.2GHz. Something the Rampage III Formula is only too happy to apply.
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yeah...I've been sold on this board for a while...except...

Near as I can tell all these first gen SATA 6Gb boards use a Marvell controller that is just a nightmare, no RAID, buggy, and no BIOS fix for the problem in the offing.

I am working on the cooling loop and waiting, hoping, that we get one last gen of 1366 boards with better SATA 6Gb before they fall off the back of the truck. I see that the EVGA SATA 6Gb updated boards are out of stock pretty much everywhere so I have my fingers crossed that there will be a new classified that fits the bill, but I fear that all efforts are now focused on LGA 2011.
 
I love my Rampage III Formula. Its Intel NIC has a special app to prioritize traffic for gaming. And the Onboard sound is the best I've heard. It is, for all intents and purposes, indistinguishable from the SB X-Fi Titanium in my other system.

Yes, the Marvel SATA-III control chip is less than stellar. And there is 4-pin molex connector that supplies extra juice for the Graphics Cards, which is in an Inconvenient spot. But other than that I have absolutely no complaints.
 
Not surprised. Im down for pretty much any Asus performance board. Seems they hit it out of the park every time.
 
I'm currently enjoying this very board. It performs great and the compatibility seems to be second to none.
 
Hello jojo69 Limp Gawd, 1.3 Years

What Marvell issues are you talking about?

The controller on the Rampage III Formula is the 9128 which does support Raid. I will note that due to the interconnect to the PCI-E bus there is a lower throughput limit ( for SSD in raid ) For high performance SSDs ( especially Sandforce 2 and C300 drives ) it would make more sense to connect to the Intel Southbridge for the highest level of throughput ( in raid 0 ). With that noted i would also like to note do not recommend raid on SSD drives as you lose trim support which while newer generation controllers offer onboard garbage collection for the long term ensured performance it is important to maintain this function/feature.
Additionally Marvell has been quite active in continuing to develop a refined driver to maximize the performance throughput and overall performance of their controllers. I have found no issues with the other functionality but if you have specifics please let me know. The current driver build undergoing validation is 1051 which I will update the thread with results with ( I have been using 1045 for a while and was used for the screenshot below )

Below are some screenscaputes for reference specifically on the Rampage III Formula. These just focus on showing the performance of a SATA6G SSD on a Marvell Controller ( these numbers are considerably less would the drive be connected to the Intel Southbridge.



Uploaded with ImageShack.us

Hope this helps as always should you have any questions please let me know. Please enjoy the rest of your day.
 
Well, haven't I opened a can of worms.

First off, thank you for your post. The participation of manufacturers is very welcome and is one of the things that makes this forum special. Let me state that I am very much a fan of ASUS products in general, I have worked with several and found them to be very robust solutions.

Further, I do not present myself as any kind of expert in the alleged deficiencies of the SATA controller in question. I'm just a regular guy shopping for a new MOBO and spending a lot of (probably too much) time reading reviews and user forums. I do not yet own one of these controllers and have not yet worked with one.

What I can say is that there is a fair amount of chatter out there implying that SATA6Gb is not yet truly ready for prime time. I do not personally know to what extent this is true, and in retrospect probably overstated the case in my previous post, but the chatter is sufficient in both quantity and quality to give this consumer pause as I consider waiting a bit.

Your point about TRIM not being supported through RAID is well taken, though I have heard hints that this limitation may soon be overcome. Also, it would appear that the 9128 is an improvement over previous 91xx implementations. Still there seem to be quite a few folks that are underwhelmed by current SATA6Gb performance, particularly in RAID0.

This was in no way a dig at ASUS product, as all motherboard manufacturers are, to my knowledge, currently mounting this same part.

I offer this from an EVGA rep in this thread

"We have looked into this, and the issue is a hardware limitation offered by the controller. In fact, all boards that use the current Marvell SATA 6G controller will run at similar speeds in RAID 0 with high performance SSD’s. One alternative to have faster results is to use a PCI-E add in card.

This limitation will be very much like onboard graphics and discreet graphics. Also, the next generation of Marvell controllers are coming out next year and hopefully the bottleneck can be overcome. At the moment, the current Marvell SATA 6G controller is the best solution to squeeze into a small footprint."
 
Juan_Jose said:
...<snip>...
Additionally Marvell has been quite active in continuing to develop a refined driver to maximize the performance throughput and overall performance of their controllers. I have found no issues with the other functionality but if you have specifics please let me know. The current driver build undergoing validation is 1051 which I will update the thread with results with ( I have been using 1045 for a while and was used for the screenshot below )

...<snip>...

Hope this helps as always should you have any questions please let me know. Please enjoy the rest of your day.
Click to expand...

Hmm..., When I go on the support site I don't see drivers newer than "V1.0.0.1034" (while doing a search for Windows 7 64-bit compatible drivers). Where is the "1045" driver of which you speak?
 
Slightly off the track of Marvell controllers, but I'd heard the southbridge and northbridge on the R3F can run a bit hot... but I didn't quite expect 53C for the southbridge and 63C for the northbridge pretty consistently (depends on ambient, but it never gets over 80F in here for reference), with the latter shooting-up to 70C occasionally while gaming. They both seem to be getting plenty of fresh airflow from my RV02-E, so I'm just kinda wondering if that's normal and ok, and at what point I should be concerned (max temps pretty much) as I'm just running at stock right now.

Also thinking of replacing the thermal paste on the SB + NB, but am wondering if anyone else has tried that and whether or not it made a proper difference. I've got some AS5 ready to go xD
 
I offer excerpts from the 2 most recent reviews from Newegg for the RIIIE

"Cons: The Marvell controller is a bit finicky when it comes to SSDs. Avoid this MB if using SSDs as a boot drive, at least until better Marvell drivers become available. SSDs work great as slaves though."

"SATA 6 is useless. Can't raid 0 with it. All my connections are on the SATA 3. Hasn't made any speed difference."

I reiterate, this is no way a criticism directed specifically at Asus...but EVGA has at least acknowledged that SATA6 performance may not be up to users expectations at this time. I would really like to see a response from Asus on this besides denial.
 
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