- last edited on by
ROGBot
So I find myself dragging my feet to do this review.
Not to take away from the fact that this board is packed with features but the price point is just something I could never afford. This is not to say people can't afford it, I'm sure most who can afford to shell out $999 for a gulftown can and would, it's just the fact that I can't and I always have personal internal mental conflicts promoting hardware not in my budget.
That said let me put my personal conflicts aside and get down to business.
For testing purposes and to stress the Overclockability of the board I have chose to use a bloomfield chip over gulftown, I know it clocks gulftown fine having used one at an event recently, not hard however to jack a multi up, after all any board can do that with a unlocked chip.
Lets take a look at the board and packaging.
So here's the board in the box, really can't complain here, ASUS did not go any further overboard with packaging than they currently ship the elder brother Rampage III Extreme with which most likely means we aren't paying anymore for packaging.
The board and its elder brothers R III E and R III F.
Playing with different video card and sound card configuration. I must note that if your using this board likely you opted for CU II or matrix cards as well. If running 2 one fan intake will have some air restriction. ref cards would be a non issue.
At first glance this is just an R III E but upon closer inspection the pcb layout on the lower half of the board is completely different.
Hidden under the NB heatsink we see the fujitsu cap was also swapped out for NEC.
One of my gripes with R III E was when using the included NB fan it interfered with many heatsinks in certain orientations.
This one is a tad better, although the True 120 still has clearance issues the
Megahalems has enough clearance.
Last but not least the Sound/ethernet card internals and why this board has a hefty pricetag. I'm no electronics guru but it sure looks like a lot of high quality parts crammed onto this little PCB.
I will be doing a performance comparison over the next week or so versus it's elder brother R III E more so to make sure performance is still in line if not better.
Not to take away from the fact that this board is packed with features but the price point is just something I could never afford. This is not to say people can't afford it, I'm sure most who can afford to shell out $999 for a gulftown can and would, it's just the fact that I can't and I always have personal internal mental conflicts promoting hardware not in my budget.
That said let me put my personal conflicts aside and get down to business.
For testing purposes and to stress the Overclockability of the board I have chose to use a bloomfield chip over gulftown, I know it clocks gulftown fine having used one at an event recently, not hard however to jack a multi up, after all any board can do that with a unlocked chip.
Lets take a look at the board and packaging.
So here's the board in the box, really can't complain here, ASUS did not go any further overboard with packaging than they currently ship the elder brother Rampage III Extreme with which most likely means we aren't paying anymore for packaging.
The board and its elder brothers R III E and R III F.
Playing with different video card and sound card configuration. I must note that if your using this board likely you opted for CU II or matrix cards as well. If running 2 one fan intake will have some air restriction. ref cards would be a non issue.
At first glance this is just an R III E but upon closer inspection the pcb layout on the lower half of the board is completely different.
Hidden under the NB heatsink we see the fujitsu cap was also swapped out for NEC.
One of my gripes with R III E was when using the included NB fan it interfered with many heatsinks in certain orientations.
This one is a tad better, although the True 120 still has clearance issues the
Megahalems has enough clearance.
Last but not least the Sound/ethernet card internals and why this board has a hefty pricetag. I'm no electronics guru but it sure looks like a lot of high quality parts crammed onto this little PCB.
I will be doing a performance comparison over the next week or so versus it's elder brother R III E more so to make sure performance is still in line if not better.
Ok so took me a couple of days to warm up to this board and figure it out.
I will say that this board requires a certain amount of finesse to hit high bclk but it can be acchieved once you get the hang of it.
First I would like to say that i was rather dissapointed with max bclk on air however it did not take long to figure out cpu just wanted to be cooler.
After extensive testing i'd say this about the avg stable bclk for air.
Over 235 will take some work for benching on air, on water it was easy.
After determining that heat was going to hold my bclk potential back I swapped to phase change which put a smile on my face in short time.
3d bclk limits which may scale the colder it gets, not sure yet
2d bclk limit for 32m pi, also may scale colder.
Max bclk and its bootable, also may scale futher with cold.
You tube of booting.
Spent a little more time on the board.
Verified I could hit 4800 uncore ( limit of this cpu on phase change ) while maintaing high bclk and cpu clocks, I was actually suprised it managed to do it in 64 bit.
Next up was seeing how high bclk worked with an optimised cpu clock.
We already know the board can do 250 bclk in vantage but it's rather pointless at sub par cpu, ram and uncore speeds.
4725 is about limit of my cpu on phase for vantage so this is more than acceptable.
I will say that this board requires a certain amount of finesse to hit high bclk but it can be acchieved once you get the hang of it.
First I would like to say that i was rather dissapointed with max bclk on air however it did not take long to figure out cpu just wanted to be cooler.
After extensive testing i'd say this about the avg stable bclk for air.
Over 235 will take some work for benching on air, on water it was easy.
After determining that heat was going to hold my bclk potential back I swapped to phase change which put a smile on my face in short time.
3d bclk limits which may scale the colder it gets, not sure yet
2d bclk limit for 32m pi, also may scale colder.
Max bclk and its bootable, also may scale futher with cold.
You tube of booting.
Spent a little more time on the board.
Verified I could hit 4800 uncore ( limit of this cpu on phase change ) while maintaing high bclk and cpu clocks, I was actually suprised it managed to do it in 64 bit.
Next up was seeing how high bclk worked with an optimised cpu clock.
We already know the board can do 250 bclk in vantage but it's rather pointless at sub par cpu, ram and uncore speeds.
4725 is about limit of my cpu on phase for vantage so this is more than acceptable.
Performance comparison BE versus R III E head to head.
Testing methods consist of the following.
All benches run 3 times back to back then averaged.
Fresh boot before running the next different benchmark
OS made prior on a master drive then duplicated to bench drive to ensure a fresh OS for both platforms.
Ht shut off in benches not benefitting HT, cores set to priority in benches not utiliyzing all 4 cores.
Here's a shot of the drive duplicator. This is a hardware copy not an image and is very good at keeping things consistant.
Settings for BE board.
The BE board test setup.
OS and settings I have chosen for the compare.
Vga will be at stock for consistency.
Included along with final average results will be middle results from all the runs.
BE 3D 11 4940
BE
BE 3D vantage 22036
BE
BE 3D 06 28497
BE
BE 3D 05 37048
BE
BE 3D 03 90869
BE
BE AM3 242,045
BE
BE Heaven 795.7097
BE
BE Maxxmem 1629.9
BE
BE pifast 17.84
BE
BE spi 1m 8.590
BE
BE spi 32m 7m 44.723
BE
BE wprime 32m 5.376
BE
For anyone interested in the complete 3 runs I did should they wish to analyze them they can be found in the following link.
http://chew.ln2cooling.com/?Qwd=./ASUS%20Black%20Edition/BE%20compare&Qiv=thumbs&Qis=M
R III E results to follow soon as well as some other stuff but I am tired now, needs some rest.
Testing methods consist of the following.
All benches run 3 times back to back then averaged.
Fresh boot before running the next different benchmark
OS made prior on a master drive then duplicated to bench drive to ensure a fresh OS for both platforms.
Ht shut off in benches not benefitting HT, cores set to priority in benches not utiliyzing all 4 cores.
Here's a shot of the drive duplicator. This is a hardware copy not an image and is very good at keeping things consistant.
Settings for BE board.
The BE board test setup.
OS and settings I have chosen for the compare.
Vga will be at stock for consistency.
Included along with final average results will be middle results from all the runs.
BE 3D 11 4940
BE
BE 3D vantage 22036
BE
BE 3D 06 28497
BE
BE 3D 05 37048
BE
BE 3D 03 90869
BE
BE AM3 242,045
BE
BE Heaven 795.7097
BE
BE Maxxmem 1629.9
BE
BE pifast 17.84
BE
BE spi 1m 8.590
BE
BE spi 32m 7m 44.723
BE
BE wprime 32m 5.376
BE
For anyone interested in the complete 3 runs I did should they wish to analyze them they can be found in the following link.
http://chew.ln2cooling.com/?Qwd=./ASUS%20Black%20Edition/BE%20compare&Qiv=thumbs&Qis=M
R III E results to follow soon as well as some other stuff but I am tired now, needs some rest.
Ok so practical usage :idea: Hmm practical and me really do not mix but I will give it a shot sort of.... 😄
Got 3way installed, killer nic and thunderbolt audio.
Can you guess what i'm up to
Youtube Demo
Got 3way installed, killer nic and thunderbolt audio.
Can you guess what i'm up to
Youtube Demo
