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Asus Republic Of Gamers products are immediately recognisable, shipping in a bright red box with the famous logo set to the side.
The Asus Rampage IV Extreme is one of five boards that ASUS are releasing today and is the flagship product, just above the P9X79 Deluxe. It is expected to retail for £334.99 and is bundled with a copy of Battlefield 3, although it wasn't featured in our early review sample.
The bundle with this product is extremely comprehensive, and suits a luxury branded board. They include a ROG Connect Cable, 1 x 3 way SLI bridge, 1 x 4 way SLI bridge, 1 x SLI cable, 1 x Crossfire cable, 1 x 2 in 1 Q connector Kit, 2 x 2 in 1 SATA 3GB/s cables, 2 x 2 in 1 SATA 6GB/s cables, 1 x I/O Shield, 1 x 12 in 1 ROG Cable labels, 1 x Probelt cable set, 1 x OC key, 1 x OC key cable and a socket pad module. Phew!
The board is built around a black PCB with red accenting on the slots and ports. This board measures 30.5 cm x 27.2 cm fitting the ATX standard.
The board is populated with mean looking black heatsinks to help ensure stability when overclocked to the limit. This board is actively cooled, with a small fan visible at the bottom right of the PCB layout.
The Rampage IV Extreme Edition board is catered towards hard core overclockers and has an 8 phase CPU power implementation, with 3 phase QPI/DRAM power, 2 phase NB power and 2 phase memory power. Along the top of the board, next to the memory slots are various tools to aid with overclocking and trouble shooting. There is also a power on and reset button here for quick, easy access and an LED for diagnostic readout. Asus include a PCIe x16 Lane Switch so users can disable and enable the corresponding PCIe x 16 slots.
The hard core overclocking audience will certainly like the ‘slow mode' switch which can be used when benchmarking with LN2. Asus say “Some processors have a small optimum temperature range to run at their highest frequency. Warmer or colder yields instability at this frequency. For example, a certain processor may need -80c loaded in order to run at 5.8ghz, which means about -75C idle in order to stay stable at 5.8ghz.
Going colder or warmer crashes. It will however remain stable at slower frequencies at much coler or warmer temperatures. Once it comes out of heavy load while transitioning over to a light load, when the temperature does not warm fast enough, it may crash. To over come this simply flip the switch over to ‘slow' the processor instantaneously. Switching over to Slow-Mode during critical moments when Temperature/Max Frequency alignment is off-synch saves a lot of crashes, even when trying to boot into the OS at cold temperatures.”
The Asus Rampage IV Extreme can accept up to 64GB of memory at speeds of 1066 mhz / 1366mhz / 1600 mhz / 1866 mhz and also OC settings of 2133mhz and 2400mhz. As with all X79 boards the Rampage IV Extreme supports a Quad Channel memory architecture.
The Rampage IV Extreme supports 4 way SLI and 4 way discrete CrossfireX for the ultimate gaming performance. It has four PCIe 3.0 x 16 slots (red) which support x16, x16/x16 and x16/x8/x16 and x16/x8/x8/x8 configurations. There is also a PCIe 3.0 x 16 slot (black) which supports x8. At the bottom is a single PCIe 2.0 x1 slot.
There are eight SATA ports on the board. The two ports above at the far left (coloured red) are controlled by the ASMedia chip and run at SATA 3 (6GB/s speeds). The two red ports next to the black SATA ports are also SATA 3 (6GB/s) capable but are powered from the onboard Intel X79 chipset. The four black ports on the right are also controlled by the Intel X79 chipset, but run at SATA 3 speeds (3 GB/s). The little black ‘box' at the edge of these ports is the ASUS ‘Subzero Sense connector'. This allows for the connection of a K probe cable (bought separately) to measure motherboard temperature via BIOS, OC Key or Turbo V EVO, without having to purchase a multimeter.
The back I/O panel has connectivity for: 1x PS/2 keyboard/mouse port, 1x clr CMOS switch, 1x ROG Connect on/off button, 2x external SATA 6.0 GB/s ports, 1 x LAN (RJ45) port, 1 x Bluetooth v2.1+EDR module, 4x USB 3.0/2.0 ports (blue), 8 x USB 2.0/1.1 ports (1 also for ROG connect) and finally support for 7.1 channel audio with an optical S/PDIF I/O.
Great mobo ! but ouch on price (although expected for ROG).
That motherboard is friggin hardcore. 2400mhz memory?! awesome. probably cost £500 in the UK if they ever bring it out here however!
50GB of bandwidth with that Corsair GTX8 memory? I wet myself.
What beautiful memory too, stole the show for me today, never mind the 3960X… (which is good too I guess :p)
Great article, I would have liked to see the temperatures of that 2400mhz memory. I would say the oversized heatspreaders arent there for just show.
I cant believe the result of 50 GB/s of bandwidth with it, thats off the chart.
Great review, as always. One thing though, in the future will this CPU be used to bench new cards? Cause i think for gaming, from the small data i see in the review, it’s not the best performance/$ nor will it be affordable to 99% of gamers out there which would rather spend the cash on video cards.
No, I don’t think we will use it much for ‘general’ reviews in coming months. probably a 2600k system for those.
That Corsair memory is mindblowing. look at the design ! spectacular!
For video editing and 3d work, this is stunning. for the f irst time ive seen how high spec memory can make a difference. 2,400mhz is amazing, but can it overclock more?
Hey man, if you ever want a home for that 590 GTX QUAD SLI system, let me know.
almost 1kw from the socket. lol.
/jealous .
over 63k with 3dmark vantage? I seriously need a system upgrade, about to cry 🙁
Its a great setup, but its not mainstream or even for most enthusiast users. the price of the CPU alone means you could get a decent system, but in regards to technology its a bad sign for AMD, they are so far behind now its not even funny
Seems overkill for most users, if I played games at night and encoding video during the day, sure. but its a 2600k for me im afraid.
I love asus products. I bought one of their rampage boards a few years ago and its still working perfectly at a mad OC level.
LN2 switch is cool, wonder how many people at home would use thaT? any benefits for an ordinary user when ocing or just LN2?
Great review guys. love those high res images for board detail.
I am buying this setup when it is available. thanks for details. going to cost me 3k or so but I already have two GTX590s 🙂
I really do want to get hold of some of that memory from Corsair, that is insanely good.
How about WEI score? Can i7-3960x reach perfect 7.9? I have read many reviews that there is no processor that reach it without extreme overclocking.
Wei , the windows experience index?
Yes 7.9.
Anyone notice that Asus did not make the Rampage IV extreme with bluetooth V3.0… they are using the old 2.1 version, likely to continue the sells of they’re current Rampage III Black Edition.
Guess, they want me to wait until they come out with another black edition only for the Rampage IV?
Yeah thats weird, why would they do that?
Wow, this is cool, Intel Core i7-3960x EE is the first desktop processor capable of reaching the WEI (Windows Experience Index) perfect 7.9 at stock speed (3.30 GHz).
For the other components that have reached 7.9: DDR3 memory > 12 GB, HD 6970 or GTX 580 or faster, 200 GB or higher SATA 6 Gbps SSD.