Asus Rampage IV Extreme X79 Motherboard Preview

The board uses an ATX form factor and manages to cram a lot into it feature wise, without making things look too bloated or clogged up together. It uses the standard ROG black and red colours and much like the Sabertooth X79 board that we recently looked at, includes an active cooling solution over the Intel X79 chip.

The CPU socket area has sufficient room for larger CPU coolers and includes a passive cooling solution above and below the socket. area is very spacious and provides a lot of room for large CPU coolers. On either side of the socket, we find four DDR3 slots, allowing for a massive eight DDR3 memory modules.

The expansion slot area is where things get really interesting, especially after seeing the amount of SLI bridges that come included, it can only mean good things. We can see that we have five PCI-Express x16 slots of which the top slot and fourth slot run at x16 speeds, whilst the other three run at x8. Also included on the board is a single PCI-Express x1 slot. It’s also worth nothing that the slots are spaced out very well so that larger dual slot graphics cards shouldn’t be faced with any problems when it comes to multiple GPU card configurations such as Quad SLI.

Taking a brief look at the front panel connectors, we find nothing out of the ordinary with a magnitude of fan headers, and USB connectors including USB 3.0. There is also the usual front panel power switch and LED connectors and a BIOS switch button.

This being the second X79 board that we’ve seen from Asus, we can see that it has an active cooling solution, which we stated when looking at the Sabertooth, that we’ve been used to a passive cooling configuration for quite some time. We have reason to believe that this may assist in overclocking and aid the board in terms of stability.

Taking a look next to the cooler, we find eight SATA ports, of which four (red) utilise SATA III through use of the Intel X79 chipset and ASMedia ASM1061 controller, whilst the other four SATA ports (black) run at SATA II speeds. An interesting feature that is situated to the right of the SATA ports is a little block which is known as Subzero Sense. This provides a simple solution for the extreme overclockers who may be using such items as Liquid Nitrogen and allows you to connect a temperature probe or thermometer, whereas other boards would require two thermometers to accurately measure the temperature.