More motherboards have surfaced and this time it is ASUS’ time to shine. ASUS ROG Rampage IV will be one of the most extreme motherboards in a long time. Crammed full with functions for overclocking, like inputs for temperature probes.
ASUS ROG Rampage IV Extreme is a motherboards directly designed for overclocking and overclocker Shamino has been involved in the makings. The board has eight memory slots, with support for DDR3-2400 when overclocking, at quad-channel bandwidths.
The motherboard socket has been changed to something it calls X-Socket. It is still for LGA2011 processors, but with X-Socket cooler for LGA1366 will still be compatible with the new motherboard. A problem with LGA2011 is that you once again will have to get new coolers, or new mounting brackets. ASRock made a similar transition from LGA775 to LGA1156 with several of its motherboards.
Beside the right memory ports you will find the OC Zone where it has gathered overclocking functions. ProbeIt is measuring spots for votlages for processor, memory and other components. There are also a number of buttons for booting/rebooting, LN2 mode, Slow mode, Voltiminder 2 LED to read voltages and a section with four switches to decide which PCI Express ports that will run in x16 mode. VGA Hotwire allows you to overvolt graphics cards “risk-free”.
With Subzero Sense you can connect a regular temperature probe to measure the temperature in the pot when overclocking. It has room for two probes, and if it works as it should during very low temperatures it is a welcomed addition. OC Key is a unit you can connect between the DVI connector on the graphics card and monitor to monitor overclocking, but we don’t have any more details on OC Key than that.
The motherboard supports 4-way SLI and CrossFireX and as mentioned above there are switches in the OC Zone for setting the bandwidths for the PCIe ports. If PCI Express 3.0 works as it should, you can get full bandwidth for four graphics cards with PCI Express 2.0 standards, if you run PCI Express 3.0 x8.
Seen to the overclockingt it looks like the board has everything and then some. Even though the motherboard is EATX it gets crowded on the board with all of these functions, specially around the socket. Since the board targets overclockers directly we can see some problems with isolation around the socket. It will take some work.
The regular specifications include four SATA 3.0 Gb/s and four SATA 6.0 Gb/s. There are four USB 2.0 and four USB 3.0 that can be connected to the front of the case. On the I/O panel we have one PS/2, Clear CMOS, Bluetooth 2.1+ EDR, Gigabit Ethernet (Intel), eight USB 2.0, four USB 3.0, two eSATA 6 Gb/s, and audio ports and SPDIF.
Like all other LGA2011 motherboards we count on ASU ROG Rampage IV Extreme launching aroud the same time as Sandy Bridge-E. Ni price was mentioned, but it will be high, we can promise you that.
Source: XtremeSysteme
