ASUS Rampage IV Black Edition Review

Test Setup

ASUS Rampage IV Black Edition
Intel Core i7-4960X
Club3D HD7970 Royal Ace
Corsair Dominator Platinum
Corsair AX1200i
Corsair Neutron GTX
Corsair H100i
Windows 7 x64  

Overclocking

With the improved power delivery and endlessly refined BIOS options the Rampage IV Black makes for a great overclocker. Firstly we wanted to see how far we could push the BCLK, and obtained a superb 145MHz. Naturally this is too far to run with a multiplier, but it at least shows the potential of the Black. Popping a multiplier into the mix and our decent if unspectacular i7-4960X managed to reach 4.75GHz, which wasn’t quite stable enough for all of our testing, but considering we’re only cooling with an H100i, and we demand that our overclock is 24/7 stable rather than just for show, it’s a very good result.

      

Combining everything into a benchmark clock, we have 4.6GHz on the i7 and 2400MHz for our DDR3. This matches the 4.6GHz we obtained previously on the Rampage IV Extreme, so means that our graphs will really emphasise the difference in the motherboard itself, rather than pure clock speed differentials.