Asus ROG OC Station

OVERCLOCKING, and reliable long term overclocking at that, is probably the only sane reason to get the pricey top-bin extreme edition CPUs from Intel and AMD these days.

The mainstream CPUs from both vendors have plenty of oomph, even for resource-hogging Vista, for instance. Since you pay up to a thousand bucks for such a chip, and almost as much for a matching mainboard plus high-speed RAM, why not get some first-class overclocking gadgets too?

That's why Asus's Republic of Gamers group came up with its ROG OC Station, a stylish 2-bay front casing device with a display and a hi-fi style giant dial plus buttons that let you control all the overclocking parameters on the fly, without any BIOS or OS dependence (good for Linux users). The little black device with its own CPU and realtime OS has a 3-inch LCD with a simple GUI covering everything - from voltages, temperatures, frequencies and clock multipliers to system status and choices between different saved profiles.

The contraption connects to the Asus mainboard. For now it supports only the Rampage II family on Core i7 and the Crosshair for Phenom II, but Rampage X48 support for Core 2 Extreme CPUs is planned too. It hooks up via a combined USB and dedicated ROG connector using the supplied cable.

I set it up in a fairly high-end Rampage II Extreme mainboard configuration based on the Core i7 975XE processor running at 4GHz standard with 6GB of 3-channel DDR3-1600 CL 6-6-6-15 GEIL RAM (the DIMMs themselves are DDR3-2133 rated!) cooled with the GEIL Cyclone memory fan. The CPU is cooled with Coolermaster V10 TEC Peltier and 10 heat-pipe heat sink with dual fans, rotated opposite of the normal direction so that I can replace the memory sticks easily. All of this kit was fed by a trusty Corsair HX1000 power supply.

I had the brand new, yet unreleased, BIOS 1501 on the mainboard and the latest 1.06 version driver for the OC station installed on under 64-bit Vista Ultimate. The impressive performance numbers obtained will be the subject of another story after the weekend.

The setup ran at a very low voltage for the performance provided: 1.35V for the CPU cores, 1.3V for CPU uncore, 1.6V for the RAM, and all other voltages default. I ran a variety of Sandra 2009 tests - processor, multimedia, cryptography, memory - and tested how Asus's own AIsuite software applet compares against the OC Station results shown, both at idle and under load.

The outcome was very interesting. When running at idle, the numbers shown more or less matched between the ROG OC Station readouts and the AIsuite software, with the voltages pretty much the same and the temperatures shown within a degree of difference - not bad. However, once at 100 per cent CPU load with multimedia tests running, something weird happened. As the CPU temperature jumped above 55C, the AIsuite desktop software applet was updated quickly, while the OC Station showed gradually increasing heat, rising above 40C step by step. But then, as the CPU load reached 100 per cent, the AIsuite output froze, while the OC Station continued showing the changes, including temperature, voltage and such, and stayed fully responsive during testing.

At the end, the AIsuite software went berserk showing 65,535V CPU power and 65,535 RPM fan speeds - a bit too much even for rocket engines - while the ROG OC Station kept showing reasonable values. Of course those AIsuite outputs were just maximum 16-bit integer values. The AIsuite applet had to be restarted after the benchmark to get back to showing normal values.

Then I tried, as an experiment, to test the durability of the gadget by suddenly increasing the multiplier from 30X to 32X (4.27 GHz) on the OC Station "hi-fi volume dial" without increasing the voltage. Well, the system kept responding for three seconds, then went to a blue screen straightaway.

So, Asus may as well add automatic voltage uplifts as we increase the CPU multiplier, otherwise you'd need to make of all these adjustments step by step before speeding up the machine. Yes, better than tweaking the BIOS or using Windows utilities, but still not exactly on the fly yet.

In summary, yes the ROG OC Station is a fashionable and high-tech gadget for uber overclockers, bringing us into an era of "stylish overclocking", and it may make life easier for extreme overclockers using advanced cooling or non-Windows platforms. It looks cool, but the price needs to go down from a couple of hundred buckz towards say $99 or thereabouts, maybe in a simplified single-bay device, to be really justifiable. At the same time, more automatic voltage adjustment when upping the CPU frequency would be welcome.

The Good
A first-of-its-kind innovative gadget, Good looks, Easy Overclocking for any OS

The Bad
High price, No automated voltage adjustments when upping the CPU speed

The Ugly
Nothing

Bartenders Report

8/10