ASUS Rampage Extreme motherboard

We're pretty familiar with the aesthetic of ASUS' Republic of Gamer boards now, but let's see how the Rampage Extreme shapes up in this regard.

The overall layout and design of the Rampage Extreme does indeed basically match most other Republic of Gamers parts, which makes for what is overall a pretty clean and well thought-out layout with no obvious complaints about bad component placement that I can think of.  By default, the northbridge ships with ASUS' 'Fusion' cooling system which allows for water cooling of the chipset, but this can be switched to a more traditional chipset cooler, as we'll see later.  The southbridge cooler also includes a spot where you can autograph your motherboard, so if you fancy yourself as the next world renowned overclocker then your scribble could be immortalised forever more as you become a God amongst men.  Or something.

This particular motherboard also sports some top-notch power regulation capabilities, courtesy of a sixteen phase power supply which utilises three phases for its northbridge and two phases for memory while claiming power efficiency as high as 96% to make for a stable system that shouldn't generate too much excess heat.

The motherboard's backplate gives us, as usual for a Republic of Gamers part, no PS/2 mouse port, which leaves us with a PS/2 keyboard input and a total of six USB 2.0 ports.  Also available from the rear of the system is a CMOS reset button, two RJ-45 Gigabit Ethernet ports, and a single FireWire and eSATA port for your delectation.

This motherboard can accept four DDR3 modules clocked at speeds up to 1333MHz at standard clock speeds, or 1600MHz using Intel XMP supported memory modules, while allowing for a maximum of a maximum of 8GB of RAM to be installed.

Aside from two PCI and a couple of PCI Express 1x slots (excluding the third slot used for the SupremeFX X-Fi audio solution), we find ourselves with two full PCI Express 2.0 16x connectors for graphics boards.

Aside from a single parallel ATA channel, eight Serial ATA ports are available on the Rampage Extreme.  While the six blue coloured ports are run from the motherboard's ICH10R southbridge, the other two are powered by their own chip - These also tie in with ASUS' easy to use offering which allows for two disks to be easily set up in a RAID-0 or RAID-1 configuration via their clumsily-named 'HDD speeding' functionality.

That aforementioned 'HDD Speeding' functionality, as well as the board's eSATA port, and powered by this Silicon Image Sil5723CNU chip.

FireWire support is provided by VIA's VT6308P part.

The Gigabit Ethernet ports on the Rampage Extreme are powered by a pair of Marvell 88E8056-NNC1 chips.

As per the Maximus II Formula we reviewed recently, the Rampage Extreme supports Creative's new SoundBlaster X-Fi MB technology, which in essence uses the hardware codec of another audio processor (in this case Analog Devices' new A2000DX part, the successor to their previous AD1988B chip) coupled with software CPU utilisation to offer up much of the functionality of Creative's current X-Fi sound cards.  This means that you get access to EAX functionality up to EAX 4.0 (meaning no EAX 5.0 support), as well as other features such as 3D CMSS and Crystalizer for improving sound quality.  The lack of EAX 5.0 is also a bit of a blow, but at least with EAX 4.0 support you're in a far better position than you would normally be with a standard on-board sound solution.

All of the audio outputs are featured on the rear of this PCI Express 1x board, with the usual connectivity on offer for eight-channel analogue audio as well as optical and coaxial SPDIF, line-in and microphone functionality.

The Maximus II Formula gave us some cool-looking new 'Start' and 'Reset' buttons, but the Rampage Extreme adds to this by providing a new set of toggle and confirmation buttons coupled with a selection toggle switch.  "What for?", I hear you ask.  To put it simply, these controls allow you to interface with the BIOS directly via the Rampage Extreme's LCD poster, so that you can either monitor the hardware or, even more impressively, alter BIOS settings on the fly, making for an ideal way to tweak your overclocking attempts in real-time as necessary to get the best out of your system.  It might not be something you use every day, but it's yet another fantastic little innovation from ASUS that can only be applauded.

The innovation doesn't stop there though - ASUS also ships the Rampage Extreme with a couple of upgrades to the motherboards cooling capabilities.  The first comes courtesy of the heatsink which sits where air is normally vented past the CPU and out of the rear of the chassis.  By default, the heatsink seen above is attached to the board, but a couple of screws later (no sniggering at the back)...

...and it's replaced with this massive heatsink, complete with copper heatpipe.

The same concept applies to the board's northbridge cooler.  By default, it ships with the Rampage Extreme's Fusion block design with water cooling in mind.

However, this too can be replaced with a beefier heatsink if you're looking to use air cooling, which again makes use of a copper heatpipe.  While some people may want to use their own cooling for the motherboard chipset, if you're looking for a simple all-in-one solution then ASUS have given you plenty of handy tools at your disposal.

All in all, chances are you've never seen a motherboard with quite such a comprehensive amount of functionality by default - From chipset cooling down to easy BIOS tweaking, the Rampage Extreme has the lot and then some.