ASUS Rampage IV Formula Motherboard Review

Overclocking
Ah another overclocking adventure!  Since taking over motherboard reviews I’ve had some fun overclocking systems, and I have learned quite a lot.  ASUS gives you quite a few different options when it comes to overclocking.  Let’s first start with the easiest.  In the AI Suite II software you can open up TurboV EVO and go into the CPU Level Up Tab.  Here you can instantly overclock your system.  The settings here are all dependent on your CPU.  For our i7-3930K we can go all the way up to 4.250GHz.

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If you want more control over your overclock you can fine tune things in the TurboV Evo software.  Again this is very easy and can all be done within Windows.

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Now for the more advanced user you can go into the BIOS and overclock that way.  Of course that is where I started my overclocking adventure.  First off the same CPU Level Up settings are available in the BIOS as well.

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ASUS is nice enough to give you different OC profiles that you can load.  They include a normal OC Profile, Gamer’s OC Profile, Extreme OC Profile (Low Current), Extreme OC Profile (High Current).  These are not just profiles that will change your frequency settings, but they will change voltages and everything else to allow you to get the best overclock possible.

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I decided to see how far I could take the i7-3930K (3.2GHz).  This is an unlocked CPU so you don’t have to deal with the CPU straps, you can just increase the multiplier.  So I started at 40, which would bring the system up to 4.0GHz.  No problems there, so I kept on increasing.  The higher I got I had to start increasing voltages, mostly the CPU Vcore.  Moving up things were halted at 4.9GHz.  The system would boot at 5.0GHz, but the system would freeze when Windows started to load.  I tried many different settings, but nothing would get me passed the Windows freezing issue.  With a 49x multiplier things were good though.  Below you can see my voltage settings.

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Getting into Windows I went through the stress tests and everything was running smoothly.  This is a great overclock, up 1.7GHz from 3.2GHz.  That is a 53% overclock and the highest overclock we have achieved on this processor!

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Another way you can instantly overclock the system is with the GO Button.  You can set the values for the overclock in the BIOS.  When you system is on just hit that button on the board and your system will be instantly overclocked.

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