Asus Rampage IV Extreme X79 Motherboard Review

You may have noticed a pattern throughout our testing and I’m not referring to the results, but more to the boards in question. If you hadn’t already noticed, they are all Republic of Gamers based motherboards from Asus and there is a very good reason as to why, actually, make that two reasons.

The first reason is that they are all very similar, and as the saying goes about apples and pears. In the real-world, there is no point comparing a high end board to an entry level as no one is contemplating boards from each end of the spectrum, so instead we made it so that we had the top Asus boards from each socket including X58, Z68 and of course X79.

Now the second reason is more of a personal one, and that all comes down to me loving Asus ROG motherboards. I mean what’s not to love? The styling is top notch and always has been and with the age old saying of “If it’s not broke, don’t fix it” why do Asus need to change? It packs a lot of features, and when I say a lot, I’m probably underselling it, as it packs more features with this board than some brands have on their entire product line combined.

We spoke about the features that this board has that are certainly unique to say the least, with the OC Key being the main highlight. Being honest, we didn’t get on with it that great and believe that it still has some teething problems but that’s expected from something new and hopefully over time, this problems will get rectified and iron themselves out. Other features that aren’t necessarily unique to this board but are to Asus in general is the USB boost which we didn’t test extensively but it does seem to offer a slight increase, but we really need to look further into the technology behind this.

One thing that we are keen to test out is the SubZero Sense which involves us researching heavily to provide you with the most factual articles we can on the technology and process behind using SubZero Sense so stay tuned as we want to get that on our to-do list as soon as possible.

Results and performance wise, we saw some strong results keeping up with the competition, but nothing outstanding when comparing against Z68 which is going to be cheaper for the processor, whereas the board will retail at similar prices. The Rampage IV Extreme can be had for £320 inc VAT which is a lot cheaper than we first thought it would be considering this is taking over the ever so expensive X58.

It’s a great board with great potential but certain areas of the processor and technology from Intel have to be fine-tuned to get it perfect which mainly comes down to the quad channel memory not being as fast as dual channel in our tests, but it is worth noting that we turned certain features off like Turbo Boost to give you a true stock result.

Overall, it’s a worthy board to be added into the Republic of Gamers product line-up and has huge potential behind it, and though we’ve looked quite extensively at the board, there are still a lot of areas that can be explored in further detail, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do. The Rampage IV Extreme has now earnt its right in our test bed lab and will be used for further testing as we explore further into X79 and the true potential behind the processors and chipset.