BIOS Interface

Unlike traditional micro-ATX motherboards on the market, ASUS has outfitted the Rampage II Gene with a very powerful BIOS that doesn’t compromise when it comes to tweaking for maximum performance. At the same time however, the motherboard’s BIOS is quite accessible for newbies who may not be well versed in tuning BIOS settings.

One example of this is the Rampage II Gene’s CPU Level Up feature. With this BIOS setting, the BIOS will automatically make all the adjustments for you to “level up” to the next highest Core i7 clock speed. Say for instance you bought a Core i7-920 but want 940 or even 965 speeds. With the level up feature, both Core i7 chips are offered as options in BIOS, simply select the processor you want to emulate, and Level Up does the rest of the work for you. And by the way, if you already own a Core i7-965 EE processor, you can use Level Up to overclock your processor to 3.6GHz or 4.0GHz.


ASUS also provides a Memory Level Up setting so you can run your memory at DDR3 speeds of 1333MHz or 1600MHz (remember technically the X58 chipset is designed to run at speeds of 1066MHz, anything beyond that is considered overclocking by Intel even though many motherboard and memory manufacturers support it).

Traditional enthusiasts don’t care for the wizards and tools that automatically do all the work for you when it comes to OC’ing, and would rather do it all manually by hand. For this type of user, the Rampage II Gene won’t disappoint, with base clock speeds ranging from 100-500MHz in 1MHz increments, PCIe speeds from 100-200MHz, and DDR3 speeds up to 2.0GHz.

Voltages offered are also pretty flexible. For instance, CPU voltages range from 0.85V-2.50V in increments of 0.00625V. You can also adjust CPU PLL voltage from 1.81592V-2.50492V in increments of 0.01325V while DRAM voltages range from 1.51106V-2.50481V at increments as fine as 0.01325V. If you’d like to dive even deeper, you can add up to 200mV on each individual memory channel.

Chipset voltage settings are also offered, with IOH voltage for the north bridge ranging from 1.11341V-2.19991V (0.01325V increments), PCIe IOH voltage from 1.51106V-2.78306V (0.01325V increments), ICH voltage from 1.11341V-2.0116V (0.01325V increments), and ICH PCIe south bridge voltage from 1.51106V-2.05431V (0.01325V increments).

Finally, QPI/DRAM voltages range from 1.2-2.5V in increments of 0.00625V.



Obviously with such high voltage ranges, inexperienced users could easily accidentally up the voltage too high, potentially frying system components like the CPU and RAM. To protect newbies from doing this, ASUS has implemented an Extreme OV (Overvoltage) setting into the board’s BIOS. By default this setting is disabled, so you can’t select the crazy high overvoltage settings. When toggled to the enabled setting though, the full gamut of voltages is available within the board’s BIOS. Some other X58 motherboards accomplish this via jumpers, so its nice to see the Rampage provides it via BIOS, which is much easier for users to toggle.


From within the board’s BIOS you can also toggle features such as the board’s LEDs and the LCD Poster module. Like other ASUS motherboards, you can also setup your own custom profiles (up to 8 are supported) and Q-Fan is provided as well.

Overall we’re quite pleased with the Rampage II Gene’s BIOS and don’t think you’ll be disappointed either.

Overclocking

This was the one area we were a little disappointed with the Rampage II Gene – our OC results weren’t as high as we would’ve liked. While we could boot the board at base clock speeds as high as 191MHz, we couldn’t get everything to run completely stable until we lowered the base clock frequency down to 180MHz. That’s considerably lower than the 200MHz+ OCs we’ve hit with other X58 motherboards, including ASUS’ own P6T.

Fortunately we were still able to crank our Core i7 CPUs up to really high speeds thanks to the BIOS’ Level Up feature, our i7-965 Extreme Edition CPU ran all day at 4.04GHz (26.0x154), but this solution is less than ideal as obviously most users don’t have Extreme Edition processors with an unlocked clock multiplier. Instead you’ll use the base clock frequency to hit that really high OC you’ve been eyeing.

Obviously this is just one sample, so it’s hard to know if our results are indicative of all Rampage II Gene boards, or ours is just an isolated case. As always with OC’ing, your mileage can, and will often vary. It’s also possible that BIOS updates could unleash higher clocks in the future, ASUS has only released three additional BIOS updates since the first release. (We used ASUS’ 0601 BIOS for our testing, an 0705 BIOS was just released within the last week.)