ASUS Rampage IV Extreme pictured

ASUS has released pictures of its top of the range LGA 2011 motherboard for the impending Sandy Bridge – E releases later this year. Being targeted at the high end of the market the Rampage IV Extreme is naturally a Republic of Gamers motherboard so inherits that more typical red and black ROG colour theme. The board offers all the expansion and connectivity a gamer could ever need and use thanks to the E-ATX form factor this board uses. As with most ASUS boards power delivery is a particularly strong point with assistance for high voltage overclocking provided in both the hardware set up and the bios controls.

The LGA 2011 socket is wired to two sets of quad channel memory slots allowing for up to 8 DIMMs at any one time. All the VRMs are located around the CPU socket cooled by interconnected heat pipes and heat sinks which all lead to the X79 chipset which is actively cooled by a small fan of about 40mm. You get PCI-E 3.0 in abundance, four lanes of which two are 8X and two are 16X. There is also a PCI-E 2.0 4X and 1X slot for expansion cards that use lower bandwidth. You also get eight SATA ports of which there is a 50/50 split between SATA II and SATA III. For external connections there’s an E-SATA, bluetooth, ROG connect and surprisingly only one Ethernet port which may disappoint some users since most high end LGA 2011 motherboards are coming with dual ethernet. Audio is provided by the Realtek ALC898 8+2 channel HDA codec.

Finally there is socket LGA 1366 compatibility with older water blocks and air coolers so there’s no need for an expensive upgrade. Additional power (excluding the standard 8 pin EPS and 24 pin ATX connectors) is inputted via a 4 pin CPU connector and a 6 pin PCI-E connector to provide additional “juice” when overclocking. And to top everything off nicely there is a copy of Battlefield 3 Limited edition with every board.

Source: VR-Zone