Overclocking
For our overclocking tests, we dropped the CPU multiplier to 6X—its lowest possible value. We also reduced the memory bus speed to keep our DIMMs operating within their limits. Next, we turned our attention to the front-side bus on each board, cranking it up and using a two-way Prime95 load to test stability along the way.

The DX48BT2 was up first, and overclocking it was a bit of a chore. We eventually got the board stable with a 460MHz front-side bus, but no amount of extra voltage or dark magic would coax 470MHz into stability under load.

460MHz is nothing to sneeze at, but it's hardly spectacular by Core 2 motherboard standards. We've had plenty of cheaper P35-based motherboards reach that speed and higher. The real problem with overclocking the Bonetrail board is the fact that you have to reset a motherboard jumper after a failed overclocking attempt. Most high-end motherboards are capable of recovering gracefully from a failed attempt by rebooting with BIOS defaults, which is considerably more convenient.

By comparison, overclocking the Rampage Formula was a snap. The board automatically reboots with BIOS defaults if you push it too far, and even if you go beyond the point of auto-recovery, there's still a CMOS reset button in the port cluster.

Not that we needed it. The Rampage sailed up to a 500MHz front-side bus without so much as a voltage tweak. We had to increase the front-side bus and north bridge voltages by 0.1V each to get the board stable at 510MHz under load, and that was all she wrote. 520MHz refused to post, even with additional voltages applied all around. Not even the board's auxiliary cooling fan made a difference.

Of course, as is always the case with overclocking, your mileage may vary.

Power consumption
We measured system power consumption, sans monitor and speakers, at the wall outlet using a Watts Up Pro power meter. Power consumption was measured at idle and under a load consisting of a multi-threaded Cinebench 10 render running in parallel with the "rthdribl" high dynamic range lighting demo.

The Rampage and BT2 have virtually the same power draw under load, but the Asus board is more frugal at idle. It's curious, though, that the idle power draw of Asus and Gigabyte's X48 boards is lower than that of Intel's own.