ASUS Rampage IV Black Edition Review
by Ian Cutress on January 5, 2014 10:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Intel
- Asus
- X79
Many thanks to...
We must thank the following companies for kindly providing hardware for our test bed:
Thank you to OCZ for providing us with 1250W Gold Power Supplies.
Thank you to G.Skill for providing us with memory kits.
Thank you to Corsair for providing us with an AX1200i PSU, Corsair H80i CLC and 16GB 2400C10 memory.
Thank you to ASUS for providing us with the AMD GPUs and some IO Testing kit.
Thank you to ECS for providing us with the NVIDIA GPUs.
Thank you to Rosewill for providing us with the 500W Platinum Power Supply for mITX testing, BlackHawk Ultra, and 1600W Hercules PSU for extreme dual CPU + quad GPU testing, and RK-9100 keyboards.
Thank you to ASRock for providing us with the 802.11ac wireless router for testing.
Test Setup
Test Setup | |
Processor | Intel Core i7-4960X ES 6 Cores, 12 Threads, 3.6 GHz (4.0 GHz Turbo) |
Motherboards | EVGA X79 Dark ASUS Rampage IV Black Edition |
Cooling | Corsair H80i Thermalright TRUE Copper |
Power Supply | OCZ 1250W Gold ZX Series Corsair AX1200i Platinum PSU |
Memory | 2 x Corsair Vengeance Pro 2x8 GB DDR3 2400 10-12-12 Kit |
Memory Settings | XMP (2400 10-12-12) |
Video Cards | ASUS HD7970 3GB ECS GTX 580 1536MB |
Video Drivers | Catalyst 13.1 NVIDIA Drivers 310.90 WHQL |
Hard Drive | OCZ Vertex 3 256GB |
Optical Drive | LG GH22NS50 |
Case | Open Test Bed |
Operating System | Windows 7 64-bit |
USB 2/3 Testing | OCZ Vertex 3 240GB with SATA->USB Adaptor |
WiFi Testing | D-Link DIR-865L 802.11ac Dual Band Router |
Power Consumption
Power consumption was tested on the system as a whole with a wall meter connected to the OCZ 1250W power supply, while in a dual 7970 GPU configuration. This power supply is Gold rated, and as I am in the UK on a 230-240 V supply, leads to ~75% efficiency > 50W, and 90%+ efficiency at 250W, which is suitable for both idle and multi-GPU loading. This method of power reading allows us to compare the power management of the UEFI and the board to supply components with power under load, and includes typical PSU losses due to efficiency. These are the real world values that consumers may expect from a typical system (minus the monitor) using this motherboard.
While this method for power measurement may not be ideal, and you feel these numbers are not representative due to the high wattage power supply being used (we use the same PSU to remain consistent over a series of reviews, and the fact that some boards on our test bed get tested with three or four high powered GPUs), the important point to take away is the relationship between the numbers. These boards are all under the same conditions, and thus the differences between them should be easy to spot.
X79 always loses out on idle power usage compared to the newer platforms. The RIVBE, with the movement of functionality onto the OC Panel, actually does reasonably well in our power measurements.
Windows 7 POST Time
Different motherboards have different POST sequences before an operating system is initialized. A lot of this is dependent on the board itself, and POST boot time is determined by the controllers on board (and the sequence of how those extras are organized). As part of our testing, we are now going to look at the POST Boot Time - this is the time from pressing the ON button on the computer to when Windows 7 starts loading. (We discount Windows loading as it is highly variable given Windows specific features.) These results are subject to human error, so please allow +/- 1 second in these results.
By moving overclocking controllers and features onto the OC Panel, ASUS is able to speed up our Windows 7 POST time test. 15 seconds is a lot faster than the RIVE, for example.
21 Comments
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Origin64 - Sunday, January 5, 2014 - link
Thats some tasty pasta, my friend!bcg27 - Sunday, January 5, 2014 - link
After reading the article about smart phone audio analysis using the Audio Precision audio analyzer I was hoping to see some mobo audio results as well. Any chance of that happening?IanCutress - Sunday, January 5, 2014 - link
Top of page 5 for some basic audio tests using the board itself. I unfortunately do not have any AP hardware to do tests here. We're all scattered around the world, no big office to all draw on the same equipment.AssBall - Sunday, January 5, 2014 - link
The Gisele Blumchen of ivy bridge boards. So sexy. So out of my league. I struggle to justify Asus Deluxe series, which mind you are excellent. This is so over the top though.cactusdog - Monday, January 6, 2014 - link
Nice board but not for me. Intel should be shot for not upgrading the chipset. They expect you pay $1,000 for CPU and motherboard but the features are worse than 2 year old mainstream chipset.I always get the high end but sandy-e/ivy-e was a big letdown. Hopefully, Haswell-e will make the high end worthwhile again.
fluxtatic - Monday, January 6, 2014 - link
As regards the comment about this board missing Thunderbolt - is it just me, or has TB support fallen off a cliff? I honestly can't remember the last motherboard review I saw where it was mentioned the board had TB ports.Sabresiberian - Monday, January 6, 2014 - link
TYVM for adding sound analysis to your testing. :)toyotabedzrock - Tuesday, January 7, 2014 - link
Dare I ask what AliWangWang is? On page 2 there is a list of processes for setting up network priority.doggghouse - Tuesday, February 4, 2014 - link
I had to look it up... it's a chat program used for Taobao, which is sort of like eBay in China.sparkyuiop - Tuesday, January 21, 2014 - link
I bought 2 x AMD R9290 graphics cards for this but they don't clear the raised SATA ports or the north bridge chipset heatsink. Bummer!Don't try and mount the board in the corsair cases that have a rounded corner on the motherboard mounting panel, it don't go in! You can put 3 x double stand-offs at the SATA end 3 x single stand-offs at the I/O end and miss out screwing the middle fixings so as to slant the board but that's a bit shit when spending out the money for this hardware. So that's what I did!