Asus Rampage IV Extreme X79 Motherboard Review

A common problem that a lot of users find is compatability, and this is generally resolved through the BIOS, which we’ll look into a little bit later. A scenario that many users are faced with, is that moment when you buy a motherboard and find that your particular components may not be compatible with it, and the only solution would be to buy or borrow some hardware that is known to work, but sometimes this is not always an easy option.

Once you have the working, compatible components, you can continue to flash the BIOS of the board and then swap the offending pieces back into the board and hope that the updated BIOS may now accept it, which for most cases is the way that things go.

If you don’t have the money to buy extra hardware, or have friends with compatible components, you may find yourself in a slight predicament and no where to go, apart from sending the motherboard back to the manufacturer for them to do the deed.

Asus have answered your prayers now though, with the new BIOS Flashback feature which allows the user to update their BIOS without a complete system being installed together. All you need is a working power supply, a USB flash drive formatted in either FAT16 or FAT32 and the motherboard itself. You don’t require any memory or processor and that’s what makes this so sweet.

Its so simple to do which is the beauty of it, as it just requires you to grab the updated BIOS image file, which in this case can be found on the Asus support website when searching for Rampage IV Extreme, and to rename the file name to R4E.ROM as this is the only name that the system can recognize, as you may have several different files within your flash drive. Once you’ve done this, you can continue to connect the drive into the boards white USB 2.0 port which is also used for ROG Connect among other functions. Once this is done, you simply hold the USB BIOS flashback button for 5 seconds until the LED starts to blink. This button, which in other situations, is used for enabling ROG connect will continue to blink and will eventually (usually after around 3 minutes) stop blinking, which is to notify you that the BIOS update is complete.

We did mention that this feature is called BIOS Flashback, and there is a very good reason for that, as this feature doesn’t just allow you to update your BIOS to a newer version, but it also allows you to downgrade or rollback to an older version. The reasoning behind this is very clear, and we mentioned it at the Asus X79 event that we first saw this board debut at. Some users find that updating their BIOS to a newer version, can sometimes cause more problems in terms of incompatibility and instability, therefore leaving them in a situation where they’d like to rollback to an older version of the BIOS, but a lot of board manufacturers don’t allow this, whereas Asus do with this particular board.