ASUS Rampage III Formula Motherboard Review

Then the next issue hit me, gaming performance, more specifically using the maximum BCLK I could achieve stably. The 220MHz base clock caused a large drop in performance, especially in Far Cry 2 where it was around 25%. Other games replicated the problem and to make sure it wasn't isolated to the few games I tested, I fired up Battlefield Bad Company 2. At 1920 x 1200 and 4x anti-aliasing, there was a 7 FPS drop representing a 10% performance deficit. I tried a number of ways to solve the problem, from moving the graphics card to a different slot to providing additional power using the onboard EZ-Plus but nothing worked. The only way to achieve a high overclock without affecting GPU performance was by using a BCLK of less than 216MHz. Realistically, most users will end up using a BCLK of 200MHz so this issue will only affect a small percentage of people but for a motherboard marketed for its overclocking and gaming abilities, this was a disappointing observation.