ASUS Rampage IV Black Edition Review
by Ian Cutress on January 5, 2014 10:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Intel
- Asus
- X79
Gaming Benchmarks
Metro2033
Our first analysis is with the perennial reviewers’ favorite, Metro2033. It occurs in a lot of reviews for a couple of reasons – it has a very easy to use benchmark GUI that anyone can use, and it is often very GPU limited, at least in single GPU mode. Metro2033 is a strenuous DX11 benchmark that can challenge most systems that try to run it at any high-end settings. Developed by 4A Games and released in March 2010, we use the inbuilt DirectX 11 Frontline benchmark to test the hardware at 1440p with full graphical settings. Results are given as the average frame rate from a second batch of 4 runs, as Metro has a tendency to inflate the scores for the first batch by up to 5%.
| Metro 2033 | 1 GPU | 2 GPU | 3 GPU |
| AMD | |||
| NVIDIA |
Dirt 3
Dirt 3 is a rallying video game and the third in the Dirt series of the Colin McRae Rally series, developed and published by Codemasters. Dirt 3 also falls under the list of ‘games with a handy benchmark mode’. In previous testing, Dirt 3 has always seemed to love cores, memory, GPUs, PCIe lane bandwidth, everything. The small issue with Dirt 3 is that depending on the benchmark mode tested, the benchmark launcher is not indicative of game play per se, citing numbers higher than actually observed. Despite this, the benchmark mode also includes an element of uncertainty, by actually driving a race, rather than a predetermined sequence of events such as Metro 2033. This in essence should make the benchmark more variable, but we take repeated in order to smooth this out. Using the benchmark mode, Dirt 3 is run at 1440p with Ultra graphical settings. Results are reported as the average frame rate across four runs.
| Dirt 3 | 1 GPU | 2 GPU | 3 GPU |
| AMD | |||
| NVIDIA |
Having access to full native lanes in tri-crossfire helps get that extra 10-30 FPS in Dirt3, although moving from 200 to 230 FPS is actually not that noticeable.
Civilization V
A game that has plagued my testing over the past twelve months is Civilization V. Being on the older 12.3 Catalyst drivers were somewhat of a nightmare, giving no scaling, and as a result I dropped it from my test suite after only a couple of reviews. With the later drivers used for this review, the situation has improved but only slightly, as you will see below. Civilization V seems to run into a scaling bottleneck very early on, and any additional GPU allocation only causes worse performance.
Our Civilization V testing uses Ryan’s GPU benchmark test all wrapped up in a neat batch file. We test at 1080p, and report the average frame rate of a 5 minute test.
| Civilization V | 1 GPU | 2 GPU | 3 GPU |
| AMD | |||
| NVIDIA |
Sleeping Dogs
While not necessarily a game on everybody’s lips, Sleeping Dogs is a strenuous game with a pretty hardcore benchmark that scales well with additional GPU power due to its SSAA implementation. The team over at Adrenaline.com.br is supreme for making an easy to use benchmark GUI, allowing a numpty like me to charge ahead with a set of four 1440p runs with maximum graphical settings.
| Sleeping Dogs | 1 GPU | 2 GPU | 3 GPU |
| AMD | |||
| NVIDIA |
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21 Comments
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JlHADJOE - Sunday, January 5, 2014 - link
Wait, so the Auto-OC actually beat your manual OC results? Impressive!The table says Auto-OC managed to get 47/47/46/46/45/45 stable where your manual OC maxed out at 45, and it also got 45x100 stable at less volts and lower temps than manual.
Razorbak86 - Sunday, January 5, 2014 - link
The PovRay score for the 45x100 manual OC was higher, the voltage was lower, and the OCCT temp was lower. I'd say the 4.5GHz manual OC beat the Auto-OC hands down.JlHADJOE - Monday, January 6, 2014 - link
Auto OC: 45x100, 1.400V BIOS, 1.408V load, 77CManual OC: 45x100, 1.425V BIOS, 1.440V load, 80C
Slightly higher Povray is probably just variance, or down to something other than the CPU (perhaps XMP timings). I'd say the Auto-OC was better.
IanCutress - Sunday, January 5, 2014 - link
For the manual OC I only adjust the voltage, CPU multiplier and the CPU load line calibration, which is pretty much what most users will do when manually overclocking unless told otherwise (or there's another setting you must adjust). It's clear the Auto-OC does a bit more under the hood (VCCSA/VSSIO voltages most likely) - at the expense of a higher voltage (to catch more processors). In my test, I also only focus on all cores the same speed, and the stress test attacks all cores, rather than single cores that might be higher turboed. There is scope to go playing around with all the settings, which is what the ROG forums are there to do for users who have only one motherboard every couple of years to organise :)jasonelmore - Sunday, January 5, 2014 - link
I've found that disabling the C States of power saving features such as speed step has drastically improved my max overclock on the Rampage IV Extereme BESamus - Sunday, January 5, 2014 - link
$500!? yeooow.Gen-An - Sunday, January 5, 2014 - link
Ian,Have you seen any noticeable difference in memory OC using the Black Edition vs the original RIVE with the same CPU and RAM? People on various forums are saying the BE is more optimized for IB-E and memory OC, but I haven't been able to find anything definitive to support that statement.
jigglywiggly - Sunday, January 5, 2014 - link
why's the first picture skewed lol?great review as always ;D
IanCutress - Sunday, January 5, 2014 - link
I haven't stressed the RIVE with Ivy-E and high (2800+) memory yet, although this motherboard was designed with Ivy Bridge-E as the focus after ASUS finished the Maximus VI range. So if there are optimisations for Ivy-E above the RIVE that are more than just BIOS, the RIVBE should have them. So while I don't have any data, I expect that would be the case. Now whether faster memory is actually useful for a given workload is a different matter...Gen-An - Wednesday, January 8, 2014 - link
Just interested for the OC fun factor, 24/7 I run DDR3-2400 C9.