It’s been six months since I reviewed the Asus Extreme Formula Maximus. The Extreme was one of three Asus motherboards X38 water cooled with the Extreme at the top of the tree, the Fusion SE block in the middle and the base of Formula Maximus bottom of the ladder.

Today we have a Formula X48 chipped Rampage of the review and is the spitting image of the Formula Maximus. This is logical as the difference between the X38 and X48 chipsets are non-existent apart from the addition of official support for a 1600MHz FSB faster and system memory. The surprise is still Asus which lists the X38 Maximus on its website Republic Of Gamers, as we look at the full range Maximus to be phased out as the Rampage line replaces.

The Rampage Formula supports Intel processors Penryn with the full range of speeds FSB and a bit like Formula Maximus he uses DDR2 memory rather than prefer Intel DDR3. We understand there will be a Rampage Extreme model that uses DDR3, which is something that would have sounded the alarm a few months ago that the prime DDR3 was enormous. At present, 2 GB of DDR3 costs just over £ 100 to £ 50 compared to 2GB DDR2 fast so that the gap is closing, and fast.

The passive cooling system of the chipset and the power hardware is large and was moved to the wholesale Maximus. Although it appears that the cooling system may intrude on the CPU cooler or your graphics card, appearances are deceiving. Asus has kept the series of coolers and heatpipes in low profile, which combined with the fixed SATA and IDE connections to make this one of the mothers easier to install and to the orchestra.

Asus provides an audio riser card that sits on top of most high-PCI slot, and even if you pack them in a pair of double-slot graphics cards in CrossFire you will find that you have at least one PCI slot and one PCI Express x1 slot By adding available for other expansion cards, such as RAID controllers, or Wi-Fi adapters Also, both graphics have slots 16 3870 X2, in Crossfire .

The I / O panel includes a modest range of ports and connectors because it is widely taken up by a large part of the cooling system chipset. There’s just a connection PS / 2 keyboard, six USB ports divided into three pairs, one Firewire, optical and coaxial outputs for audio, dual Gigabit LAN and a button to clear the BIOS settings. There is a risk that you can press the button by mistake CMOS so that the switch can be activated or deactivated by a switch flick which is next to the Southbridge. The sensible approach is to activate the button when you are overclocking your system once you have more stable, you can disable the button to avoid problems. If you need more ports there is a checkmark in the box with two USB and Firewire a second. The Rampage seemed that we know from our review Maximus we plunged into the test with piles of optimism, but that quickly faded. The first question mark was raised as we had been sent by the BIOS Asus 0207, but the board had installed BIOS 0219. There was no way we were going to install an earlier version of the BIOS because it is a step backwards in anyone’s book. As X48 While on the latest processors and processor bus speeds of up to the first test was a Core 2 Extreme QX9650 on a frontside bus 1333. The Bios burst into life, but refused to load Windows. Switching to a 1600MHz QX9770 got everything going on successfully. Once we had 64-bit Windows Vista installed we were able to investigate the mysterious ways of Penryn and why the hell we were unable to get the QX9650 to run on default settings.

It seems that the answer lies in the depths of the voltage settings, which is a little embarrassing because Asus offers a total of seven parameters to play with. The first step is to use the equipment to follow in the BIOS to define what are the operating parameters by default and use this as a starting point.

You can crank up the CPU PLL, North Bridge, DRAM FSB Termination, South Bridge and voltage of 1.5 V SB smoothly thanks to the use of the system colors in the BIOS to stay out of trouble. Green is safe, yellow is your chance to grow and red is decidedly risky. The strange in one of the parameters was the CPU voltage as our Penryns were very agitated about the amount of energy they wanted.

In the past, we were able to run our QX9650 on a variety of motherboards including a Gigabyte X48-DQ6 on Auto or with additional voltage settings for overclocking. On the Rampage we had to manually set the tension to get the system working and were then able to raise the voltage of 1.40V basis for overclocking.

The QX9770 is easier to obtain than the automatic operation worked perfectly BIOS settings, but when it came to overclocking QX9770 did not want to see more of the core voltage of 1.24V. This is the standard voltage applied through a manual setup, and when we raised the voltage of the processor refused to overclock.
Also, it is also clear that the memory overvolting Rampage is approximately 0.1 V more than the chosen setting, which is a little mischievous. Our conclusion is that the BIOS is a work in progress which is almost - but not quite - complete.

Even though it took a fair amount of work to get our QX9650 and QX9770 systems operating satisfactorily, once we got there, the results were very impressive. The systems were strong, cool, calm and stable, but it is difficult to give a big thumbs up when you can not boot Windows on Auto settings.

Verdict

The Rampage Formula takes over from Maximus with all the bells and whistles that we have a right to expect from Asus cards upmarket. But the transition from X38 to X48 Intel’s chipset is not a great difference in the performance of the real world, and it is clear that the BIOS is still much work even before has some basic features. We would recommend you wait a few weeks and keep an eye on updates to the BIOS before you plump for this one.