Asus ROG Rampage V Extreme review: A beast of a board for the ambitious Intel X99-based system-builder

Intel announced the **Haswell E platform** earlier this month, and along with it the Intel X99 chipset. Motherboard makers had already started showing off their boards towards the end of last month. Asus sent us their Republic of Gamer series’ flagship board - the X99 Rampage V Extreme. This being a completely new platform, with new DDR4 RAM slots as well, took us a bit longer to test. but let us check out the board before talking performance numbers. Build Quality [caption id=“attachment_236092” align=“aligncenter” width=“640”]  Asus Rampage V Extreme checks most of the boxes expected from an ROG series board[/caption] Belonging to the ROG segment, there is one thing that has remained constant for years - the black and red colour scheme. While Asus has experimented with colour combinations on the non-ROG boards, the ROG colour scheme has remained constant and a quick way to recall the brand. On first glance, the board looks dense with circuitry. There is barely any breathing space, but Asus has ensured that there is enough clearance space for the components on board. For instance, the LGA 2011-v3 socket is surrounded by four DIMM slots on either side and there is enough clearance on the sides to install your CPU cooler. Similarly with the PCIe x16 slots in the lower half, Asus has ensured that you can have a 4-way multi-GPU configuration with ease.  The build quality of the heatsinks is top notch. The heat sinks around the voltage regulator module (VRM), is connected to the heatsink beside the DIMM slots using a heat pipe. The heatsink around the chipset is a passive one, but has a sturdy build and sharp edges complementing the design on the heat sinks on top. We would have liked to see one with more fins for faster heat dissipation. Since the X99 boards use the LGA 2011-v3 socket, you can use the coolers from the X79 generation as the socket dimensions are similar. Board Layout There are five PCIe x16 slots of which one is PCIe 2.0 x16 slot running in the x4 mode and four PCIe 3.0 x16 slots running in x16, x16/x16, x16/x8/x8 or x16/x8/x8/x8 mode with 40-lane CPU (for 4-way GPU setup) and x16, x16/x8, x8/x8/x8 mode with 28-lane CPU (with 3-way GPU setup). Apart from this there is a single PCIe x1 slot.  [caption id=“attachment_236129” align=“aligncenter” width=“640”]  There are four PCIe 3.0 x16 ports and one PCIe 2.0 x16 slot along with one PCIe x1 slot[/caption] On the bottom you have the molex pin for providing extra power, followed by a Soundstage button for audio enhancement in games. Beside this you have the USB 3.0 header, a USB 2.0 header along with the front panel header and a BIOS select button in the corner.  [caption id=“attachment_236094” align=“aligncenter” width=“640”]  There are eight SATA 6Gbps ports along with two SATA Express ports[/caption] Coming to the right hand side, we have the eight SATA 6 Gbps connectors all parallel to the board and below these you have the two SATA Express ports. One of the SATA Express port runs of the Intel X99 chipset along with the eight SATA 6Gbps ports whereas the other SATA Express port runs off an ASMedia controller, and which is also compatible with two SATA 6Gbps ports. Beside the SATA ports, you have the second USB 3.0 header. Between the USB 3.0 header and the RAM slot, you have an M.2 connector.  [caption id=“attachment_236093” align=“aligncenter” width=“640”]  On the top right hand side you have the OC zone with dedicated buttons to check memory module (MemOK), restarting the system from any point (Retry) and safe booting to tweak your OC settings[/caption] Going upwards, there is the 24-pin ATX power connector. Just behind the power connector you have voltage readout points. Considering this is a flagship board, Asus has the regular bells and whistles such as POST error debug LED, dedicated larger power and reset buttons, PCIe switch and smaller buttons for Safe Boot, Retry and MemOK. Retry lets you restart your system from any state, so that you do not have to bother with holding down the power button for 5 seconds in case you get the blue screen of death whilst overclocking. The Safe Boot lets you change back your settings in case you are not getting that sweet spot while overclocking. So you don’t need to clear the CMOS outright. The power and reset buttons have a good feedback, whereas the other buttons are at the board level and require precise presses. The PCIe switches let you turn the PCIe slots on/off for power saving when having a multi-GPU setup and not using all the graphics cards. Around the LGA 2011-v3 socket, you have eight DIMM slots, four each on either side, just like we had seen with the X79 socket LGA 2011 boards. Behind the VRM heatsink, you have the eight-pin power connector and an additional four-pin one if you are planning to overclock your system. The DIMM slots can hold upto 64GB DDR4 RAM with native speed support for 2133MHz and OC support for upto 3300MHz. [caption id=“attachment_236095” align=“aligncenter” width=“640”]  On the left hand bottom side, you have the electromagnetically isolated audio section[/caption] Finally on the left hand side, the lower half is occupied by the SupremeFX audio section which is electromagnetically isolated from the rest of the board, indicated by the glowing red border line. The top half comprises the backpanel IO ports. You have 10 USB 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0 ports, a gigabit LAN port, dedicated wireless antenna out ports. There is an ROG Connect button just below the BIOS reset button beside the PS/2 port.  [caption id=“attachment_236139” align=“aligncenter” width=“640”]  The backpanel IO has all the ports you expect from a high end boad[/caption]   Features We will get into the features of the Asus Rampage V Extreme, but first let us talk a bit on the new platform and the Haswell E flagship processor.  Intel X99 Platform and Intel Core i7 5960X Intel X99 platform is an upgrade of the 3-year old X79 platform, which was launched back in 2011. A quick comparison of the platforms since X79 shows the age of the platform, specially with the limited native support for things such as SATA 6Gbps ports, USB 3.0 ports, PCIe storage and so on. The Intel X99 platforms brings about a lot of changes and supports quad-channel DDR4 RAM. For the performance enthusiasts who had invested in the X79 platform, the X99 is a significant upgrade after the 3-year period. [caption id=“attachment_236140” align=“aligncenter” width=“539”]  AIDA64 Cache and memory benchmark for Intel Core i7 5960X with 32GB DDR4 RAM[/caption] The Intel Core i7 5960X is Intel’s first 8-core hyper-threaded processor for enthusiast and pro-consumer desktop users. It has a base clock of 3 GHz with the turbo clock speed going to 3.5GHz. Apart from this, the Haswell E lineup has two 6-core processors namely Intel Core i7 5930K and Intel Core i7 5820K. All these processors are based on the 22nm manufacturing node. BIOS and Utilities Asus has one of the most functional BIOSes and with the ROG Extreme, Asus has decided to keep it simple. The UEFI BIOS has a black and red colour tone similar to the boards and the main menu and instead of having the graphically heavy BIOS we have a more presentable classic BIOS layout. The Extreme Tweaker segment is the main place to go to for overclockers as it allows you to manipulate clock speeds, multiplier counts, DRAM speeds, voltages and so on. It also offers Overclock tuner and Xtreme Tweaking options which gives you options to activate some preset OC settings.  Some may find the endless scrolling on the Extreme Tweaker menu a bit annoying as there are lots of settings to play around with. Asus does offer a My Favourites screen where you can put in your most used settings from across the BIOS. We like the part where the BIOS shows you the changes you have made in a particular session in the BIOS before you save and exit. You can even flash the BIOS using a USB drive from the Tool section.  [caption id=“attachment_236155” align=“aligncenter” width=“640”]  The Asus ROG Rampage V Extreme’s UEFI BIOS keeps things simple in terms of navigation and is highly detailed[/caption] Asus utilities such as the AI Suite III, EZ Update, USB 3.0 boost, USB Charger+, BIOS Flashback add value to the overall user experience. The Ai Suite III in particular lets you not only monitor temperature, fan speeds, voltage settings, but also lets you tweak these settings. You can overclock your system from within the utility. One peculiarity we noticed while using the Turbo mode to overclock the system, was the BCLK defaulting to 80MHz, despite you manually changing it to 100MHz and saving. We disabled all the power saving states, but still the BCLK would default to 80MHz instead of being at 100 MHz. We hope Asus fixes this bug in an update.   ROG OC Panel [caption id=“attachment_236130” align=“aligncenter” width=“640”]  OC Panel is an external tool which helps you monitor and tweak clock settings, voltage settings, fan speeds and much more[/caption] The ROG OC Panel is a dedicated tool which lets you monitor your system temperatures, voltages, clock speeds as well as tweak settings on the fly. It sports an OLED screen which shows numbers and parameters. There are two buttons on either side of the screen: left hand side you have mode change and OC whereas on the right you have fan speed and power button. On the main body you have a directional keypad with the top and bottom buttons being used to add or subtract from the setting whereas the left and right hand side buttons to move between the parameters. You can place the OC panel within a 5.25-inch enclosure and put it in the DVD tray on your cabinet. Or else you can place it outside your system and overclock your system on the fly. The video below shows a demo of how you can go about doing it.

Opening up the front flap reveals circuitry with provision for adding more jumpers. This is helpful for the extreme overclockers who are looking to try out LN2 overclocking, as the OC Panel board allows you to do VGA Hotwire check temperatures using Subzero Sense.  OC Socket [caption id=“attachment_236131” align=“aligncenter” width=“640”]  Asus has implemented the OC Socket in the ROG Rampage V Extreme, whose extra pins let you monitor and monitor and tweak Vcore[/caption] With the Rampage V Extreme, Asus has also come out with a custom socket for overclockers. It is still the LGA 2011 v3 socket, but on the Rampage V Extreme it is called the OC Socket as it assists with overclocking. Haswell E CPUs have a few more pins that are generally not used on regular LGA2011 v3 sockets. Asus OC Socket gives access to these pins and this allows you to monitor Vcore, VCCSA which are generally hidden in the stock configurations. You also get increased memory overclocking potential.   Test Setup Processor: Intel Core i7-5960X, Intel Core i7-4790K, Intel Core i7-4770K Motherboard: ASUS Rampage V Extreme, Gigabyte X99-SOC Force, ASRock Z87M Extreme 4 RAM: 4x 8GB DDR4 Kingston HyperX Predator, 2x 4GB GSkill RipjawsX OS Drive: Corsair Neutron GTX 240GB Additional Drive: Western Digital Velociraptor, 150GB (secondary) PSU: Cooler Master 800W Silent Pro Gold Graphics card: AMD R9 290 OS: Windows 8.1 64-bit Monitor: BenQ GL2250   Overclocking  Asus ROG boards are renowned for their overclocking features. The Rampage V Extreme does not disappoint on that front either. We overclocked using the BIOS, AiSuite III as well as the OC Panel. Overclocking using the BIOS is quite easy and the BIOS breaks things down into detailed groups for the enthusiasts, and at the same time offers preset overclocking modes which you can activate if you want a quick overclock. The OC Panel also offers two levels of overclocking based on the processor’s base clock speed. With the Intel Core i7-5960X, we noticed that Lvl 1 took the turbo clock speed from 3.5GHz to 4GHz and Lvl 2 took it to 4.2GHz. We used the BIOS and could overclock the Intel Core i7-5960X to 4.4GHz using just air cooling.   Performance We flashed the Asus Rampage V Extreme (Asus R5E in the charts below) board with the latest BIOS (0603) and installed all the latest drivers before starting the testing. We ran our regular suite of tests, which is a mixture of synthetic and real life tests. Let us first look at the synthetic tests such as PC Mark 8, Passmark performance test, Cinebench R11.5, Cinebench R15 (single-core, multi-core and OpenGL)  where higher score is a better score. Along with this we also tested the HyperPi (8M, normal settings, all-cores) where lower score indicates better performance.       We use real-world testing scenarios, to check how well the processor performs with regular tasks. In the 7-zip file compression test, we compress a 200MB assorted file folder using a 4-character encryption. In the POV-ray test we render a 1920x1080 pixel scene with 0.3 anti-aliasing. Finally, in the video encoding test, we convert a 4.5GB MKV file to an MP4 file for viewing on the iPad. All these tests are timed and the lower the score, the better the system. We also converted an album of songs from the MP3 format to AAC format - this application and conversion process uses only a single thread. In all these tests, lower scores are better.     Gaming We tested the X99 system using two taxing games such as Metro: Last Light and Tomb Raider at various settings. Since the same graphics card is employed, you will notice fairly little difference in the scores.     Verdict and Price in India This is the first X99 board we have tested and as the numbers indicate, the Intel Haswell E processors and the the X99 platform is meant for performance junkies. The board costs about Rs 36,850 - but if you add in the cost of the Intel Core i7-5960X which is around Rs 73,000 and the quad-channel RAM kits starting from Rs 19,000 onwards - one is looking at a total system cost of over Rs 1.5 lakh. If you want the absolute best performance, which you are getting with the X99 platform, budget is a secondary consideration.  Being an ROG board, it makes more sense for someone looking at building the ultimate gaming rig. Although, the multi-threaded 8-cores on the Intel Core i7 5960X paired with quad channel DDR4 RAM makes more sense for content creation applications as well. The number of ways in which you can overclock is quite extensive, plus tools like the OC Panel really make the Asus Rampage V Extreme stand apart. In terms of features offered, the Rampage V Extreme goes all out: eight SATA 6Gbps ports, eight DIMM slots, two USB 3.0 headers with 10 USB 3.0 ports on the back panel, provision for 2/3/4 way GPU setup, user-friendly and detailed BIOS, multiple ways to overclock, OC Panel, useful utilities, on-board Wifi ac, electromagnetically isolated audio section and so on. The two SATA Express ports and the M.2 port offer future proofing. While we are still to test other X99 boards, the Rampage V Extreme comes recommended if you have the budget and your needs are ambitious.