Asus has today announced the launch of its newest E-ATX gaming motherboard, the Rampage IV Black Edition, designed specifically to take full advantage of Intel's latest line up of LGA 2011 i7 Ivy Bridge E processors, letting overclockers really go to town and pull the full potential from their CPU.

The Rampage IV Black makes use of the X79 chipset and is part of Asus' own range of Republic of Gamers products, telling you exactly who this is targeted at. It features eight memory slots, meaning you can pack in as much as 64GB of DDR3 on this bad boy. These can be combined with as many as four graphics cards, all hooked up in SLI/Crossfire to provide extreme performance.

To help overclockers take their system to the maximum, Asus is bundling an OC panel with the board (along with a copy of ACIV: Black Flag), which lets you keep an eye on your overclock, CPU temperature and fan speed. It also lets you control fan speed and overclock level, giving you a modern day turbo button. [yframe url='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCEEqLqkM40′]

To keep the system stable while you're tweaking your overclock, Asus has made use of what it describes as a “Extreme Engine DIGI+ III,” voltage regulator module, which combines NexFET MOSFETs with high quality chokes and Japanese capacitors. It's also all black in colour, to keep things looking neat.

In terms of expansion ports, there's a full six SATA III ports (two of which are designed for RAID) and four SATA II connectors, whilst on the rear, there's a total of eight USB 3.0 ports and 10 USB 2.0 slots. WiFi is built in, along with Gigabit ethernet connectivity and a SupremeFX 8-channel audio chip.

Asus was also keen to point out, that this board has already been used to break several overclocking and performance world records.

Update: Overclockers now has it listed for £399.

For more information, visit Asus's official website. This board will be “available soon,” though no official pricing has been released.

KitGuru Says: Pretty impressive board, though I'd be surprised if anyone needed that many USB ports. 

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