Cinebench R11.5
The Rampage III Black Edition shows that the it gives the Core i7-990XE a little more room to stretch. That equates in to just a little extra performance if you intend to use the ROG platform for any CPU intensive rendering. Otherwise, the platform rises again to the overclocking occasion if you need the extra CPU head room.
3DMark11
We’re looking at very similar results while each platform is running its optimal levels. I thought it interesting that the Rampage III Black Edition was noticeably faster in single video card tests. This will appeal to any extreme gamers that prefer a single high performance video card like the GTX 580.
Unigine Heaven 2.0 Demo
If you haven’t tried running the free Unigine Heaven Demo at extreme DirectX11 and maxed out settings, it will straight up slap your video card performance back to 1999. I just wanted to show you that the Rampage III Black Edition is well tuned for such such brutal configurations and game titles.
Batman: Arkhum Asylum
Maximum settings in this game can still cause your system to chug especially when using high physics settings. Both platforms are comparable right up to the point overclocking comes in to play. The extra CPU frequency gives them both extra frames but the Rampage III Black Edition can go just a bit farther.
Metro 2033
I’ve said it before. This game is truly the new “Crysis” as it includes a very brutal benchmark. Cranking up the details makes both systems work harder no matter the video card configuration.
From the numbers, you can see it looks awesome and is still quite playable. Frame rates are comparable at default but separate a bit further once the Black Edition gets going. It’s those extra BIOS optimizations coming in to play once again. When it comes to this game title, every bit counts and we’ll take it.
Battlefield: Bad company 2
BC2 is a graphics hungry first person shooter game that relies heavily on a steady stream of data provide a respectable gaming experience. That means your network (and internet for that matter) needs to be running optimally. It’s also more mature than Battlefield 3 so we’ll continue to lean on this benchmark till patches make the new game more stable. More on that in the Killer Network section.
Basically, it takes a good system to keep up at max settings. In terms of performance, the Rampage III Black Edition provides ample power and stability to the graphics cards running max settings. Since the graphics are doing the bulk of the work, it makes sense that the Assassin and Black Edition are separated by only a couple frames. They are THAT close.
Now that we’ve got all the software benchmarks out of the way, let’s beat on the hardware a little bit. Next up is a look at the two major things on this board which is the gaming grade audio and networking as well as a look at the IO performance.
Killer E2100 vs Killer E2100
The E in the model refers to it being “embedded” or integrated keeping it simple. The comparison test here mainly takes aim at the implementation of the E2100 network processor. The test results will reveal if the engineering isn’t up to par.
I’d like to say the battle was fierce but it was actually pretty uneventful varying only by .5 MB/s between the boards. Killer Networks really did their job to make sure the E2100 works perfectly and easily on whatever platform. The software is great for ensuring that games get complete network priority when you need it.
But I also found the Black Edition’s Wifi and Bluetooth mini-card extremely useful. The latencies and bandwidth were surprisingly low especially for regular network use. That also includes the integrated Intel 5286 network processor. Of all the platforms tested to date, ASUS engineers did a very good job of optimizing performance in that respect.