Overclocking
So far we've spent a considerable amount of time doing extreme
overclocking with the Rampage V Extreme. Since we wanted to gather as much
experience on the new X99 platform we focused on DDR4 overclocking. As you can
see from the scores below, we've able to bench our G.Skill F4-3000C15-16GRR
memory at 3078.2 MHz with CL10. Apart from that especially the NB (uncore)
frequency of 5'130.2 MHz was really impressive. We were surprised to see that
the uncore can be overclocked by this much with the new platform. If you do
extreme overclocking you should try to push the uncore frequency of your CPU,
since it can increase the efficiency of your system significantly.
The Rampage V Extreme definitely offers everything you could possible need in
order to push your hardware to the absolute limit. Features like onboard power
and reset button as well as debug LED belong to standard set and on top of that
ASUS came up with a retry as well as safe boot button. Both of them can make the
life of an extreme overclocker a little bit easier. In the case of safe boot you
can image a scenario where you choose to boot settings which don't work. Usually
what you're going to do now is hit the clear CMOS button, which will make you
lose all your settings. Instead you can now press the safe boot button. The
board will then boot into BIOS with safe settings and display what you've set
before the system didn't want to boot anymore. The retry button can work some
magic if you've pushed your system to the absolute limit and see BF error code
on the debug LED. Hit the retry button and with some luck your system will boot.
Another interesting feature in conjunction with the system memory is DRAM
training. ASUS is giving you the possibility to set it either to enabled, auto
or ignore. What DRAM training actually does is, it allows the system to boot
even if a memory module has died or wasn't detected. If you set DRAM training to
ignore the system is not going to boot if you have a dead memory module in it.
We appreciate this feature since we actually want to know instantly if something
is not working with the memory in our system. We don't want to boot and then be
surprised, there are only three or two memory channels working.
BIOS
As usual the ASUS
UEFI BIOS looks just great, which means the design is good and the menu is well
structured. As soon as you enter the BIOS you see that with this motherboard all
is about performance, since you arrive on the page with all the different clock
speed and voltage settings. It’s just always surprising to see that with every
new platform ASUS manages to set the bar for a great BIOS even higher. What’s
just standard is that all the different voltages as well as clock speed can be
changed on the first page. Other than that there are pre-defined overclocking
profiles for CPU as well as memory overclocking. As we’ve already mentioned in
the overclocking part before, this BIOS/board is here to drive your hardware at
the absolute limit.
Gigabyte X99-UD4 Review 