ASUS Rampage IV Extreme Black Edition Unboxing & Overview
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
2,085 words · ~10 min read
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welcome friends to my unboxing and overview of the Rampage 4 extreme black
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edition it's a rampage 4 extreme but it's been updated in some significant
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ways so memory speed has been upgraded from 2.4 GHz Max to 2.8 gz Max their
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Extreme Engine Digi plus vrm design has moved from their second gen to their
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third gen design game first 2 has been added to the onboard networking allowing
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your game packets to be prioritized Bluetooth has been updated to 4.0 and
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they've added Wireless AC which was not present on the original Rampage 4
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extreme the BIOS has a black edition theme there are 60 amp chokes versus the
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older black metallic chokes for the power design Assassin's Creed 4 is in
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the Box versus Battlefield 3 in the older one there are six SATA 3 ports
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versus four SATA 3 ports in the older one there are eight usb3 ports versus
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six usb3 ports in the older one and it comes with the OC panel versus the OC
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key for overclocking it has a Subzero temperature monitor it's got a pause
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switch VGA hot wire four extra fan headers that you can attach fans to just
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like that on an exposed PCB and much more so I'll tease you guys by holding
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the board here while I talk about some of the things that set Rog or Republic
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of Gamers apart because let's face it boards are going to perform pretty much
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the same out of the box compared to each other these days so Rog gets special
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attention there's preset profiles from the Rog team for things like CPU and
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memory to give you great starting points when you're tweaking things on your own
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there are excellent automatic management rules running in the background whenever
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you're making simple adjustments for a quick overclock to things like vcore and
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CPU frequency that enable the system to maintain stability even if you don't
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know how all those little settings work speaking of all the little settings
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there's Tweakers Paradise which gives you an enormous range of tweaking
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options that most people like like short of probably a couple dozen people in the
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entire world will never ever need but
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they're there it's also got their CPR boot recovery so it allows it to recover
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and boot up without clearing seos allowing you to continue on your Merry
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way overclocking and actually this is a bit of a new thing so unlike many Rog
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products in the past it has four-way optimization which allows F speed CPU
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speed and power consumption to be balanced and also includes their new
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away mode which turns power consumption way down when you're actually not right
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there in front of the system the first accessory we find in the box is the OC
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panel it's got a normal mode and you can mount it in a 5 and 1/4 in Bay in your
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system that gives you like a post debug readout hardware monitor info like
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temperatures and fan speeds and allows you to change your fan profiles on the
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fly or you can get crazy and get things
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into extreme mode which has insane stuff like uh it provides leads that you can
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run to make adjustments to up to four graphics cards at a time to crazy stuff
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like power switching frequency and overcurrent protection it's got Sub-Zero
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temp probes that actually plug right in here and allow you to monitor subzero
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temperatures it gives you direct control of key frequencies and voltages on the
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Fly and much more if you want a more detailed overview we actually covered it
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in the Maximus 6 Extreme unboxing quite a while ago this isn't the first time
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we've seen OC panel and it's a very cool little piece of Hardware it plugs into a
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proprietary report on supported Boards called rogor EXT accessory wise assus
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includes two-way three-way and four-way SL Bridges as well as an Rog branded
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Crossfire Bridge they include 10 SATA cables half of which are right angle and
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half of which are straight they include their Q connector for easily plugging in
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your front panel connectors as well as their dualband magnetic antenna that
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plugs into the back of the motherboard IO for your wireless implementation they
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include the cable the custom cable that you need to plug in the OC panel as well
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as an Rog connect USB cable so that you can plug a second computer usually a
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laptop into it to monitor things that way if you prefer not to use the OC
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panel they also include an IO Shield an awesome metal Republic of Gamers magnet
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that's freaking amazing as well as a manual driver disc that you can throw
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away and of course that copy of Assassin's Creed 4 Black Flag they also
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include a standard LGA 2011 back plate to go along with the custom much more
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robust one that they have pre-installed on the board now on to the motherboard
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itself the CPU socket is of course an LGA 2011 socket with full support for
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the latest extreme Edition processors for power we've got an 8 Pin and four
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pin connector that feeds the 8 plus 3phase CPU power design with 60 amp gold
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treated coating chokes this is the best power delivery design that ASUS has ever
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implemented on a consumer grade motherboard hands down in fact even the
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memory has been beefed up with two plus two phase power something that I've
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personally never seen on a board before not only that but the whole board
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features 100% 10,000 hour lifetime Black
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Metallic caps so it not only will run extremely well it'll do it for an
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extremely long time moving along along
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to the right hand side of the board we have a postcode readout as well as
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onboard switches for start and reset we can individually turn our PCI Express
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16x Lanes on and off with a bunch of dip switches here we've also got the slow
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mode dip switch which is most for extreme overclocking our 24 pin
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connector in its ideal location on the right hand Edge our usb3 connector in
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its ideal location on the right hand Edge although i' prefer to see it at a
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right angle we've also got 10 SATA connectors six of which are SATA 36 GB
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per second two provided by the Intel chipset two by as media chipsets and
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then there are four SATA 2 connectors we've got dual physical bio switches as
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well as the rest of our front panel connectors we have a BIOS switch for
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switching in between those two bioses as well as an easy plug PL down here at the
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bottom so that's a four pin Molex that provides auxiliary power if you're
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installing more than a couple of graphics cards speaking of a couple of
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Graphics per cards we've got full support for four-way Crossfire and
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four-way SLI with 16x 8X 8X 8X operation
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being the maximum that it can run at or you can go 16x 16x if you run in PCI
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Express Lots 1 and five I would like to
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backtrack a little bit here and I want to show you guys what they have done in
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terms of voltage notification as well as voltage checkpoints so their
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Pro Bel voltage checkpoints have expanded from seven voltages to 10
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including allowing you to monitor the voltages of addin video cards and their
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volt minder 2 LED system not only now indicates what kind of voltages things
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are running at with different colors representing more and more dangerous
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voltages but it can also indicate which voltage costs an overclock to fail now
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that is an extremely awesome feature and you'll find that right around here on
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the side it's become a pattern for Rampage class board boards to have
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mediocre sound implementations compared to Maximus range boards in the past
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little while but that is going out the window with the black edition so they
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have put one of their best audio implementations ever on this particular
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board it starts with the PCB moot which is a separated PCB portion just for
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audio as well as PCB shielding and a tin plated metal cover on the Supreme FX
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chip itself all of this is to reduce interference it follows up with Elna
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premium audio capacitors as well as a new W amp design to reduce interference
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and make the output cleaner they've also implemented much better than usual front
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audio so there's a separate front audio deck which is a cus logic
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cs4398 instead of HD audio and added a
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Texas Instruments TPA 61282 headphone
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amp for the front Port so even the front Port can handle 600 ohm headphones not
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only that but going along with their Supreme FX Hardware is the software side
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of things so they've got their radar overlay to show you sounds for es
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visually on the screen in front of you along with their sound enhancer with
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presets for gaming to key in on footsteps Bomb Timer beeps or other
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kinds of in-game noises as well as profiles for the sound enhancer that you
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can switch between on the Fly fan expert 2 now has along with being able to set
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you know custom fan curves and profiles that are preset or whatever you want to
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do now has full control of both DC and
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pwm fan so this is something we haven't seen before and all the fan headers are
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located here here here here here here
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here here and here so guys who is this
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board for because it's extremely expensive it's for people who want
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nothing but the absolute best that's
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what it's for if you want to load up 64 gigs of RAM you want to put an extreme
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Edition in there and load in four graphics cards and you want everything
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to actually run correctly all the components on this board are designed
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for it to actually be loaded up I mean even little simple things like the vrm
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solution for the CPU is designed to give off less interference when it's being
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heavily loaded so it's less likely to to cause a problem with some other
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component of the system that might also be working extremely hard it's not made
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for you to just kind of casually throw you know 8 gigs of RAM in it and like
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One graphics card and like you know the lowest end CPU that fits in it this is
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for the hardcore let's go around to the back of the board and I'll show you guys
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I mean even the back plates are hardcore there's back plates on the vrm back
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plates on what would typically be called the Southbridge area back when I was you
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know first getting into this stuff which was an awful long time ago and then let's finish up with iio so there's a
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PS2 keyboard mouse combo Port I still love to see this four USB 2.0 ports six
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USB 3.0 ports two EA ports gigabit Ethernet of course that has game first 2
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as well as the onboard AC audio 7.1 audio as well as optical audio out and
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finally Rog connect as well as a clear seos button built right into that
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shrouded gorgeous back that's got a nice
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big like heat sink attached to it and like a nice heat pipe up here and man
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this board looks good if you were to buy a board based on just having the best
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looking system on the Block then it would be hard to recommend anything other than the Rampage for extreme black
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edition thanks for watching this video like it if you liked it dislike it if
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you disliked it leave a comment letting me know what you think of this board and
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for that matter premium boards in general and last but not least as always
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