Asus Rampage IV Extreme X79 Motherboard Review

We all know that USB 2.0 is slowly fading into the distance, and USB 3.0 has taken over and is found a lot more commonly as of late, and offers a much faster interface and a lot better performance all around. Couple this with the price of USB 3.0 based flash drives and external hard drives coming down in price rapidly, it’s certainly a common technology that the consumer market are utilising a lot more.

What if you could make it even faster though? Asus have done exactly that with the Rampage IV Extreme motherboard by creating a feature called USB 3.0 boost, which works off the same principle as the standard USB 3.0 interface and even connects into the same ports, but just offers an even bigger boost when it comes to performance.

By being one of the the world’s first motherboards to have an onboard UASP USB3 controller and including full support, it allows the user to get the very best performance from their UASP USB3 device as long as the UASP driver is also installed on the board.

By having a UASP device, the relevant drive or device will be recognized as its plugged in and will automatically go into UASP mode and offer boosted performance. For devices that aren’t UASP, they will still get a boost through the user of “Turbo Mode” and this accounts for both USB 3.0 and 2.0 devices such as USB flash drives for instance.

The way that the extra performance is achieved is by sending multiple commands at once from the board to the device, opposed to a single command sequence that we usually see which doesn’t unleash the real, true performance of what’s on offer.

From tests that Asus conducted, they found that using a 13.8GB file in a comparion copy test, that a standard USB 3.0 interface took 134 seconds, whereas Turbo mode took only 89 seconds and the Asus UASP boost mode took even less at 76 seconds. From the original 134 second time, it shows a huge 170% increase in speed.