Asus Rampage III Extreme Motherboard Review

As with all of our reviews, we pit the default speed system against the overclocked one in a head-to-head byte match.  The effective overclock for these tests is 4.6GHz @ 28x multiplier.  The results are show below.

For several years we have stuck to using retail processors in our reviews since we felt that is what the majority of users would be able to afford.  What we didn't realize was that motherboard makers often segmented their products to align with a certain processor.  Strictly speaking from the mfg a motherboard like the Rampage III Extreme wouldn't be considered a good platform for the low end Core i7 920.  Based on our overclocking results and experience using both the 920 and 980x we can only conclude that this is total BS.  A low end processor like the 920 can benefit from the power of a R3E but only if your intention is bench style overclocking.  For regular gaming you might be best to stick with a lower end model.

Our overclocking experience was extremely good, the 980x proved to be a solid overclocker and responded well to frequency adjustments and the occasional voltage bump.  4.6Ghz isn't the limit of this particular chip but as we approached 5Ghz the heat generated was getting high enough that we decided to stop.  Of course the next step will be to put this system under the single stage phase cooler and go for broke.