Asus Rampage IV Black Edition (X79) Motherboard Review

1. Introduction2. Asus Rampage IV Black Edition: Packaging and Bundle3. Asus Rampage IV Black Edition: Board Layout and Features4. Asus Rampage IV Black Edition: BIOS5. Testing Methodology6. System: PCMark 87. System: 3DMark 118. System: 3DMark9. Processor: SiSoft Sandra10. Processor: Cinebench R11.5 64 bit11. Processor: Super Pi 12. Processor: WinRAR13. Processor: HandBrake14. Motherboard: SATA Performance15. Motherboard: USB 3.0 Performance16. Motherboard: Audio Performance17. Gaming: Bioshock Infinite18. Gaming: Metro 203319. Gaming: Metro: Last Light20. Overclocking: Frequencies21. Overclocking: Performance22. Technical: Power Consumption23. Closing Thoughts24. View All Pages

SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software.

Sandra is a (girl’s) name of Greek origin that means “defender”, “helper of mankind”. We think that’s quite fitting.

It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc.

Native ports for all major operating systems are available:

• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x86)
• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x64)
• Windows 2003/R2, 2008/R2* (IA64)
• Windows Mobile 5.x (ARM CE 5.01)
• Windows Mobile 6.x (ARM CE 5.02)

All major technologies are supported and taken advantage of:

• SMP – Multi-Processor
• MC – Multi-Core
• SMT/HT – Hyper-Threading
• MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE 4.1, SSE 4.2, AVX, FMA – Multi-Media instructions
• GPGPU, DirectX, OpenGL – Graphics
• NUMA – Non-Uniform Memory Access
• AMD64/EM64T/x64 – 64-bit extensions to x86
• IA64 – Intel* Itanium 64-bit

According to Sandra's benchmark, the processor arithmetic performance displayed by both X79 motherboards is very closely matched.

As we have seen with many of Asus' Z87 ROG models, the company is able to offer improved memory bandwidth performance over other motherboards, while still using identical test hardware. This improvement could be related to the topology and trace paths used by Asus' engineers.

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