***Asus Rampage III Extreme Owners Thread***

[CryptiK]

Looking a my old review results here, the R3E loses about ~0.1V from the VTT last cap on the high side of the power plane to the under socket MLCCs (the gap widens with increasing current - so higher frequncy = more sag). 1.35VTT set is going to be very close to 1.25V~1.27V under full load. The measurement points on the board are a little off, and report the voltage a little higher than it actually is at the north side of the socket.

I never had an R2E here so don't know what the offset between the measurement point and the north side of the socket is. The only way to check is either to flip the board while it's running (tricky) or solder a small wire to one of the MLCCs and check the offset under full load.

Of course, this was don one an earlier BIOS, there is the chance that ASUS have shifted the voltage table to compensate for the delta somewhat.

I don't think this will cure all your quirks but might explain some of the issue.

-Raja

Thankyou, that's interesting. I have at least preliminarily corrected the issue by increasing Vtt to 1.35625v in BIOS, which according to everest is 1.296v under load, and as per your findings this is higher than the real Vtt. I will have to measure at one of the MLCC's as you suggested to see what my board does. I did that with my R2E (I have a TJ07 so the socket area is cut out making access easy) and made a table of BIOS vs Software vs Real voltages.

Thing is I thought I'd sorted it last night by upping it to 1.350Vtt BIOS but this morning it hung on DRAM again on cold boot after PSU power off.

Did you investigate what enabling Vtt LLC did to the voltage? I don't usually run any LLC as I want to avoid transient overshoot conditions. However if it corrected the sag a little but still allowed some droop under load I'd be temped to use it.

Running an 980x at 4.1 Ghz and 1.3v results in cool chokes, that's with the machine crunching 24/7 and all cores fully loaded. Using an IR gun the temps are between 31c and 38c depending on the choke.

31-38*C for the chokes under full load? (Just to make sure we're talking about the same thing - the ferrite blocks with R68 written on them to the IO side of the CPU socket).

Mine are way over that. I'd say 45-50*C by guessing and touching. I'm running a W3570 at 4.3GHz @ 1.237v and have my PWM freq set to 500KHz, what do you have yours set to? You on water or air? Is there any airflow over that area in your case?