just when you thought it was impossible to cram more features into a
motherboard ASUS brought out the Rampage 4 extreme so this particular one comes
with the full copy of Battlefield 3 it is PCIe Gen 3 ready which comes along
with the territory because this is an Intel LGA 2011 socket motherboard with
the x79 chipset supporting core i7
extreme and core i7 processors on this socket that is six core processors only
so far although there should be four core processors and even more core
processors coming in the future four-way SLI and Crossfire support and a wide
wide range of other features so let's
get started here actually you know what let's let's open up the board first I'm
going to like shake things up a little bit here and I'm going to go ahead I'm
going to get the board open I'm going to get the board out of the box which you
can see through the box fairly well anyway so it's not not a huge issue one
way or the other but uh we will talk about features as we
show them on the
C there we go all right so the
motherboard let's do the accessories then we'll do the board itself and the
features when we are done with the accessories so accessories I'm going to
have to cover some of the features here as well so check this out you guys this
is the L LGA 2011 back plate oh so why
does it have an LGA 2011 back plate in the Box you might ask well that is
actually because of a feature called X socket which allows you to install
either L an LGA 2011 native cooler or
actually if we just open up uh recently closed tabs here x socket there we go or
if you check out these uh if you check out the event.
ASUS.com 20101 rx- socket website you can actually see
thirdparty coolers that support their X socket uh technology which allows you to
install your 1366 cooler on LGA 2011
boards that include x socket technology which as far as I know is just this one
okay what else we got here in terms of accessories gamer UI gamer style the
choice of Champions so here's a little Rog oh look at that it's all shiny and
like silvery put that somewhere nice okay we got the Battlefield 3 game which
you guys can't see the code for we have a three-way SLI
Bridge a four-way SLI
Bridge a two-way SLI Bridge nice flexible black cable perfect and finally
a crossfire Bridge once again black perfect okay we've got their what are
they calling this now prob belt okay so that allows you to quickly check your
voltages on a variety of things which we'll see when we open up the board we
got our IO Shield we've got Rog connect which
allows you to to overclock your CPU and change settings using the USB connection
and an additional computer we have the oxnar or Zonar sound card so apparently
this board includes Zonar technology fascinating either that or this is just
oh no this seems to be just like an ad for it oh
interesting next we have a lanyard cool it's a battlefield uh Battlefield 3
lanyard this is cool we'll get to this after R connect cable uh USB B cable of
some sort oh this is for the OC key which is also part of that so we'll get
to that later okay we've got 1 2 3 4 USB
or SATA 3 6 GB per second cables those are all right angle and then we have 1 2
3 4 SATA SATA 2 3 gbit per second cables
and those are all right angle as well finally Q connectors which allow you to
do your front panel and at least one front USB connector with additional ease
and now let's just go ahead and throw these back in here and then let's whip
out the board itself because the board
is what you folks all paid good money to
see and by paid good money I mean didn't
pay anything at all here we
go so this is not quite a standard ATX
board we've seen ASUS doing this with their Republic of Gamers level boards
for quite some time where they're
widening the board just a smidgen in
order to cram on more features so you can see here is where we would normally
have the board ending and ASUS has put about another couple centimet of PCB
where they've put a lot of useful things why don't we start with the CPU socket
so there's our LGA 2011 socket that is a
supporting core i7 and core7 extreme processors and where is the uh you know
what I'm going to be perfectly honest with you guys see here's the back plate
that's on here now I actually don't understand exactly how X socket is going
to work based on what I've seen so far
but the theory is that it does work and that's good okay as long as the cooler
supports it so that's that's the key part around the sides of the socket we
have our eight dim slots so yes ASUS has
managed even on their top tier performance board to provide eight dim
slots if you are installing only four dims I would definitely recommend you
use the red slots because those ones are
slightly further away from the CPU socket giving you a little bit more room
for bulky coolers and a little bit additional air flow around your socket
speaking of coolers we've got our vrm coolers here and here ASUS has
integrated their new generation of Digi Plus vrm on this particular board which
means that you have uh dedicated digital
voltage Regulators not only for the CPU but also for the memory which just means
additional components that they had to build into this board you can actually
you I mean you can clearly see how dense the PCB is every square inch of it is
covered with something C CPU power connectors we have one eight pin and one
four pin connector you do not have to use both of them although I would
recommend if you're going to do any serious overclocking on this board which
I hope you're doing if you're buying this board that you probably connect
both of them moving down this side of the board we have an LED post readout we
have slow mode I would probably leave that off for the most part ln2 mode
which is the jumper right here uh CPU
frequency ah okay where's that one Le
can't even see where some of these lead fascinating okay well here's all the
voltage checkpoints so you can check uh Dam CD Dam AB
PCH 1.5 PCH 1.1 VT vssa VC cor and
you've got two grounds available we have onboard start and reset switches we also
have the ability to turn on or off I
believe these are all of the PCI Express
um here the red PCI Express slots although I will double check that for
you guys we have the traditional go
button right here we've got our 24 pin connector and its ideal location along
the right hand Edge front USB 3 in what I would consider to be its ideal
location along the right hand Edge Subzero sense this is fascinating so
Subzero sents right here allows you to detect the board temperatures even when
you are well below zero so no matter how
cold you are in theory this will tell you the temperatures that you need to
know we have four SATA to 3 GB per
second and four SATA 3 6 gbit per second
Port so two of those are running off the Intel chipset or rather four all four of
those are running off the Intel chipset so that is ideal we also have an active
cooler on the chipset here which is connected by heat pipe to another active
cooler and or a passive uh heat sink and the other passive heat sink and finally
the other passive heat sink that I showed you guys already so it's like a
chain of heat pipes leading all the way down here all right keeping on moving
this button switch is which BIOS you're using so this is a multi BIOS board if
you do happen to corrupt your BIOS you can switch to the other one there's your
front panel connectors another front USB 3 and uh one two USB 2 front panel
headers finally moving over here there's your two BIOS chips there are is your
front panel audio and how many four pin
pwm connectors do we have on this board we have one here uh just zoom out far so
that they can kind of see where they are there's one here one here that's two
three four five six 7
eight four pin pwm connectors that's
that's outstanding awesome love to see it more of those is always better in my
mind so here let's have a look at the PCI Express slot layout so it is ideally
laid out for four-way uh SLI or four-way
Crossfire in an ATX or well semi ATX form factor remember XL ATX boards are
about this much longer but ASUS wants you to be be able to install this board
in any number of different cases so what you will need to do four-way SLI or
Crossfire is you will need a case like the 800d from Corsair that has uh maybe
seven expansion slots but at least like some extra space at the bottom so that
the bottom card can hang over a little bit so you can install if you're running
two asli or Crossfire you will be able to install those two cards plus an
additional one two three PCIe 16x Slots
of which uh they are all wired at 8ex
remember uh x79 is 16x 16x or it is 16x
8X 8X or it is 8x 8X 8X 8X in the way
that the PCI Express slots are going to be split up here we have a couple of
auxiliary power connectors here's a six pin as well as a four pin floppy
auxiliary power connector and let's move around to the back panel of the board
before we start to go over some of the features that I haven't necessarily
quite covered yet so 1 2 3 4 5 6 s USB
2.0 ports a PS2 keyboard mouse combo Port clear seos button there's also
another one here if for whatever reason the back panel is not convenient enough
for you we also have an Rog connect button so that's this port right here
you use that to do overclocking on another computer connected to this one
there is Bluetooth which also allows you to do overclocking but that's via your
iPad or iPhone or I guess iPod Touch
would probably also support it so you can use the app to do that we've got an
eSATA Port here another eSATA Port there gab Ethernet 4 USB 3.0 7.1 audio out
including optical audio out so let's see if there's any features here that I have
sort of missed there are some LEDs built into this board that are going to remind
you about your voltages or just I guess
warn you about your voltages is more like it and right this one ha OC key so
OC key is actually just a straight DVI
pass through so you see this and this and then you have to connect it via USB
whether you do it this way or with the internal style connector so you can see
this right here okay and what OC key
does is it overlays your bio
settings on top of the image that your
uh video card is already outputting so what that means is you can actually see
rather than just relying on this guy right here the little post post readout
you can actually see status updates about your PC you can change settings
without even interfering with whatever you're doing on the screen behind the
overlay so it's kind of like if you have a home theater and you have a receiver
that has an overlay to change whatever settings uh that at the hardware level
but it doesn't actually affect the media that's playing back in the background
and then you can just you know shut it off at will so that is the OC key I
think that's pretty cool uh let me see if there's anything that I've kind of
missed where so this is hardware driven so you can tweak your system on the Fly
and the OSD monitor right okay I already
talked to you guys so this allows you to monitor whatever information you want as
well talked about Digi plus 2 which means that you've got okay hold on let's
see if I missed anything so Japan made 10K Black Metallic capacitors these are
rated for 105° and ASUS figures they'll last up to
five times longer than regular solid caps these guys down here with all the
cooling all over them ah VGA hot wire oh I can't believe I missed this one right
here so VGA Hotwire is these headers
right here this allows you to actually overvolt your overvolt your
gpus through the ASUS utility rather
than connecting variable resistors to
the back of the board and adjusting the little dials so you soldered you have to
do all the same solder points you still have to do the work it doesn't support
just like over rting your GPU through the PCI Express lot or anything like
that but what it does allow you to do is it allows you to adjust those settings
using the motherboard so that is very
very cool uh what else do we have here forway okay and I think that pretty much
covers it nope there's one more thing so USB BIOS flashback without even a CPU or
RAM installed in the system you throw a USB key in there you rename the file to
the correct name you check the manual to make sure you've got it all set up right
you can actually Flash the BIOS in the worst case scenario which is everything
went as wrong as it can go and you can completely restore it to a new bio
couple more cool features sorry battery died is you can actually uh see the
status of any cards that are installed in the PCI Express Lots in the BIOS this
isn't a new feature on this board but it is one that I have seen on previous ASUS
boards like the Crosshair 5 that is very useful for diagnosing video card
problems especially if you have water cooling blocks on there and I think that pretty much covers it thank you for
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