X48 Rampage Formula Preview.

[Zucker2k]

This should be the same for all bioses out there, but to prevent any confusion, I'm on bios 0308 and I highly recommend that you flash to this bios as well. This is a given, but it needs repeating, this is a solid board. Unfortunately, the 45NM cpus from Intel are very sensitive and if you're off by a few volts on one of the key voltages, aka, fsbt, vcore, and vnb, you'll have to use a lot of brute force and even that won't get you far. I recommend that everyone who is having problems reaching 8x450 and above SERIOUSLY needs to find a little time and patiently run their hardware all stock, moving up slowly till your system begins to show signs of instability then you can stop and tweak. To prevent confusion, try to set the most obvious settings manually. If you're not sure, leave the gtls alone. I have this CPU for one more night before someone picks it up on *cough* cough* *cough* 'bay, so here we go....

Setup:
Asus Rampage Formula, bios 0308
Intel Quadcore Q9450
G.Skill PC2-8500 (DDR2 1066) 2x2GB kit
Windows Vista x64 SP1

As you can see everything is set manually at the lowest levels. I'm not messing with GTLs, at least it was NOT necessary.






For what it's worth....



How the voltages look under hardware monitor. You want your voltages to closely match this as possible, with the exception of vcore and vdimm; those are dependent on your hardware.



The reboot...



The result...



You can further improve performance with pull-ins. That's all folks.