BIOS

Moving along, it's now time for the BIOS. ASUS uses the same tab menu that we have come to see them use for quite some time now, which in design looks similar to the Intel OEM BIOS used on their desktop boards. However, their tweaking options pale in comparison to ASUS'. As soon as you enter into the BIOS you are greeted with the Overclocking menu with all the bus, divider, ratio and voltage options that the Rampage II Extreme is graced with.

The Advanced Chipset tab hides a few extra CPU tweaks as well as tweaking for the X58 Northbridge.

Under the CPU Configuration menu inside the Advance tab we see there are quite a few extra functions. If you happen to have an Extreme i7 CPU you can disable the Over- current protection that prevents the normal i7 from overclocking.

Overclocking

For a MicroATX board we were expecting very little in the way of overclocking; however, ASUS has taken its stance with their ROG board to produce some interesting results. While the BLCK isn't much over the 133MHz limit, we see that the CPU was able to fly to 4GHz without much strain. If we had more time we would have tweaked even more; however, we were extremely impressed with 4GHz anyway.

Important Editor Note: Our maximum overclocking result is the best result we managed in our limited time of testing the motherboard. Due to time constraints we weren't able to tweak the motherboard to the absolute maximum and find the highest possible FSB, as this could take days to find properly. We do however spend at least a few hours overclocking every motherboard to try and find the highest possible overclock in that time frame. You may or may not be able to overclock higher if you spend more time tweaking, or as new BIOS updates are released. "Burn-in" time might also come into play if you believe in that.