ASUS Rampage IV Extreme LGA2011 SLI Motherboard Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2012-05-07
·
2,646 words · ~13 min read
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just when you thought it was impossible to cram more features into a
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motherboard ASUS brought out the Rampage 4 extreme so this particular one comes
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with the full copy of Battlefield 3 it is PCIe Gen 3 ready which comes along
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with the territory because this is an Intel LGA 2011 socket motherboard with
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the x79 chipset supporting core i7
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extreme and core i7 processors on this socket that is six core processors only
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so far although there should be four core processors and even more core
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processors coming in the future four-way SLI and Crossfire support and a wide
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wide range of other features so let's
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get started here actually you know what let's let's open up the board first I'm
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going to like shake things up a little bit here and I'm going to go ahead I'm
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going to get the board open I'm going to get the board out of the box which you
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can see through the box fairly well anyway so it's not not a huge issue one
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way or the other but uh we will talk about features as we
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show them on the
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C there we go all right so the
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motherboard let's do the accessories then we'll do the board itself and the
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features when we are done with the accessories so accessories I'm going to
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have to cover some of the features here as well so check this out you guys this
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is the L LGA 2011 back plate oh so why
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does it have an LGA 2011 back plate in the Box you might ask well that is
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actually because of a feature called X socket which allows you to install
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either L an LGA 2011 native cooler or
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actually if we just open up uh recently closed tabs here x socket there we go or
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if you check out these uh if you check out the event.
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ASUS.com 20101 rx- socket website you can actually see
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thirdparty coolers that support their X socket uh technology which allows you to
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install your 1366 cooler on LGA 2011
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boards that include x socket technology which as far as I know is just this one
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okay what else we got here in terms of accessories gamer UI gamer style the
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choice of Champions so here's a little Rog oh look at that it's all shiny and
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like silvery put that somewhere nice okay we got the Battlefield 3 game which
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you guys can't see the code for we have a three-way SLI
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Bridge a four-way SLI
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Bridge a two-way SLI Bridge nice flexible black cable perfect and finally
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a crossfire Bridge once again black perfect okay we've got their what are
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they calling this now prob belt okay so that allows you to quickly check your
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voltages on a variety of things which we'll see when we open up the board we
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got our IO Shield we've got Rog connect which
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allows you to to overclock your CPU and change settings using the USB connection
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and an additional computer we have the oxnar or Zonar sound card so apparently
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this board includes Zonar technology fascinating either that or this is just
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oh no this seems to be just like an ad for it oh
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interesting next we have a lanyard cool it's a battlefield uh Battlefield 3
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lanyard this is cool we'll get to this after R connect cable uh USB B cable of
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some sort oh this is for the OC key which is also part of that so we'll get
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to that later okay we've got 1 2 3 4 USB
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or SATA 3 6 GB per second cables those are all right angle and then we have 1 2
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3 4 SATA SATA 2 3 gbit per second cables
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and those are all right angle as well finally Q connectors which allow you to
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do your front panel and at least one front USB connector with additional ease
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and now let's just go ahead and throw these back in here and then let's whip
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out the board itself because the board
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is what you folks all paid good money to
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see and by paid good money I mean didn't
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pay anything at all here we
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go so this is not quite a standard ATX
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board we've seen ASUS doing this with their Republic of Gamers level boards
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for quite some time where they're
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widening the board just a smidgen in
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order to cram on more features so you can see here is where we would normally
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have the board ending and ASUS has put about another couple centimet of PCB
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where they've put a lot of useful things why don't we start with the CPU socket
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so there's our LGA 2011 socket that is a
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supporting core i7 and core7 extreme processors and where is the uh you know
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what I'm going to be perfectly honest with you guys see here's the back plate
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that's on here now I actually don't understand exactly how X socket is going
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to work based on what I've seen so far
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but the theory is that it does work and that's good okay as long as the cooler
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supports it so that's that's the key part around the sides of the socket we
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have our eight dim slots so yes ASUS has
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managed even on their top tier performance board to provide eight dim
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slots if you are installing only four dims I would definitely recommend you
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use the red slots because those ones are
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slightly further away from the CPU socket giving you a little bit more room
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for bulky coolers and a little bit additional air flow around your socket
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speaking of coolers we've got our vrm coolers here and here ASUS has
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integrated their new generation of Digi Plus vrm on this particular board which
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means that you have uh dedicated digital
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voltage Regulators not only for the CPU but also for the memory which just means
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additional components that they had to build into this board you can actually
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you I mean you can clearly see how dense the PCB is every square inch of it is
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covered with something C CPU power connectors we have one eight pin and one
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four pin connector you do not have to use both of them although I would
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recommend if you're going to do any serious overclocking on this board which
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I hope you're doing if you're buying this board that you probably connect
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both of them moving down this side of the board we have an LED post readout we
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have slow mode I would probably leave that off for the most part ln2 mode
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which is the jumper right here uh CPU
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frequency ah okay where's that one Le
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can't even see where some of these lead fascinating okay well here's all the
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voltage checkpoints so you can check uh Dam CD Dam AB
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PCH 1.5 PCH 1.1 VT vssa VC cor and
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you've got two grounds available we have onboard start and reset switches we also
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have the ability to turn on or off I
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believe these are all of the PCI Express
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um here the red PCI Express slots although I will double check that for
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you guys we have the traditional go
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button right here we've got our 24 pin connector and its ideal location along
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the right hand Edge front USB 3 in what I would consider to be its ideal
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location along the right hand Edge Subzero sense this is fascinating so
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Subzero sents right here allows you to detect the board temperatures even when
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you are well below zero so no matter how
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cold you are in theory this will tell you the temperatures that you need to
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know we have four SATA to 3 GB per
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second and four SATA 3 6 gbit per second
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Port so two of those are running off the Intel chipset or rather four all four of
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those are running off the Intel chipset so that is ideal we also have an active
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cooler on the chipset here which is connected by heat pipe to another active
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cooler and or a passive uh heat sink and the other passive heat sink and finally
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the other passive heat sink that I showed you guys already so it's like a
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chain of heat pipes leading all the way down here all right keeping on moving
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this button switch is which BIOS you're using so this is a multi BIOS board if
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you do happen to corrupt your BIOS you can switch to the other one there's your
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front panel connectors another front USB 3 and uh one two USB 2 front panel
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headers finally moving over here there's your two BIOS chips there are is your
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front panel audio and how many four pin
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pwm connectors do we have on this board we have one here uh just zoom out far so
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that they can kind of see where they are there's one here one here that's two
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three four five six 7
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eight four pin pwm connectors that's
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that's outstanding awesome love to see it more of those is always better in my
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mind so here let's have a look at the PCI Express slot layout so it is ideally
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laid out for four-way uh SLI or four-way
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Crossfire in an ATX or well semi ATX form factor remember XL ATX boards are
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about this much longer but ASUS wants you to be be able to install this board
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in any number of different cases so what you will need to do four-way SLI or
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Crossfire is you will need a case like the 800d from Corsair that has uh maybe
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seven expansion slots but at least like some extra space at the bottom so that
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the bottom card can hang over a little bit so you can install if you're running
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two asli or Crossfire you will be able to install those two cards plus an
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additional one two three PCIe 16x Slots
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of which uh they are all wired at 8ex
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remember uh x79 is 16x 16x or it is 16x
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8X 8X or it is 8x 8X 8X 8X in the way
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that the PCI Express slots are going to be split up here we have a couple of
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auxiliary power connectors here's a six pin as well as a four pin floppy
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auxiliary power connector and let's move around to the back panel of the board
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before we start to go over some of the features that I haven't necessarily
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quite covered yet so 1 2 3 4 5 6 s USB
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2.0 ports a PS2 keyboard mouse combo Port clear seos button there's also
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another one here if for whatever reason the back panel is not convenient enough
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for you we also have an Rog connect button so that's this port right here
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you use that to do overclocking on another computer connected to this one
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there is Bluetooth which also allows you to do overclocking but that's via your
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iPad or iPhone or I guess iPod Touch
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would probably also support it so you can use the app to do that we've got an
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eSATA Port here another eSATA Port there gab Ethernet 4 USB 3.0 7.1 audio out
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including optical audio out so let's see if there's any features here that I have
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sort of missed there are some LEDs built into this board that are going to remind
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you about your voltages or just I guess
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warn you about your voltages is more like it and right this one ha OC key so
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OC key is actually just a straight DVI
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pass through so you see this and this and then you have to connect it via USB
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whether you do it this way or with the internal style connector so you can see
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this right here okay and what OC key
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does is it overlays your bio
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settings on top of the image that your
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uh video card is already outputting so what that means is you can actually see
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rather than just relying on this guy right here the little post post readout
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you can actually see status updates about your PC you can change settings
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without even interfering with whatever you're doing on the screen behind the
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overlay so it's kind of like if you have a home theater and you have a receiver
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that has an overlay to change whatever settings uh that at the hardware level
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but it doesn't actually affect the media that's playing back in the background
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and then you can just you know shut it off at will so that is the OC key I
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think that's pretty cool uh let me see if there's anything that I've kind of
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missed where so this is hardware driven so you can tweak your system on the Fly
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and the OSD monitor right okay I already
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talked to you guys so this allows you to monitor whatever information you want as
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well talked about Digi plus 2 which means that you've got okay hold on let's
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see if I missed anything so Japan made 10K Black Metallic capacitors these are
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rated for 105° and ASUS figures they'll last up to
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five times longer than regular solid caps these guys down here with all the
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cooling all over them ah VGA hot wire oh I can't believe I missed this one right
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here so VGA Hotwire is these headers
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right here this allows you to actually overvolt your overvolt your
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gpus through the ASUS utility rather
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than connecting variable resistors to
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the back of the board and adjusting the little dials so you soldered you have to
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do all the same solder points you still have to do the work it doesn't support
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just like over rting your GPU through the PCI Express lot or anything like
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that but what it does allow you to do is it allows you to adjust those settings
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using the motherboard so that is very
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very cool uh what else do we have here forway okay and I think that pretty much
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covers it nope there's one more thing so USB BIOS flashback without even a CPU or
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RAM installed in the system you throw a USB key in there you rename the file to
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the correct name you check the manual to make sure you've got it all set up right
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you can actually Flash the BIOS in the worst case scenario which is everything
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went as wrong as it can go and you can completely restore it to a new bio
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couple more cool features sorry battery died is you can actually uh see the
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status of any cards that are installed in the PCI Express Lots in the BIOS this
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isn't a new feature on this board but it is one that I have seen on previous ASUS
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boards like the Crosshair 5 that is very useful for diagnosing video card
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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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checking out my unboxing of the Rampage 4 extreme don't forget to subscribe to
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