ASUS Rampage IV Extreme Black Edition Unboxing & Overview
ASUS Rampage IV Extreme Black Edition Unboxing & Overview
2013-12-01
welcome friends to my unboxing and
overview of the rampage for extreme
Black Edition
it's a rampage for extreme but it's been
updated in some significant way so
memory speed has been upgraded from 2.4
gigahertz max to 2.8 gigahertz max their
extreme engine digi+ vrm design has
moved from their second gen to their
third gen design game first to has been
added to the onboard networking allowing
your game packets to be prioritized
Bluetooth has been updated to 4.0 and
they've added wireless AC which was not
present on the original rampage for
extreme the BIOS has a black edition
theme there are 60 amp chokes versus the
older black metallic chokes for the
power design Assassin's Creed 4 is in
the box versus battlefield 3 in the
older one there are 6 SATA 3 ports vs. 4
SATA 3 ports on the older one there are
8 USB 3 ports vs. 6 USB 3 ports on the
older one and it comes with the OC panel
vs the OC key for overclocking it has a
sub-zero temperature monitor it's got a
pause switch BG Hotwire for extra fan
headers that you can attach fans to just
like that on an exposed PCB and much
more so I'll tease you guys by holding
the board here while I talk about some
of the things that set rog or republic
of gamers apart because let's face it
boards are going to perform pretty much
the same out of the box compared to each
other these days so rog gets special
attention there's preset profiles from
the rog team for things like CPU and
memory to give you great starting points
when you're tweaking things on your own
there are excellent automatic management
rules running in the background whatever
you're making simple adjustments for a
quick overclock to things like V core
and CPU frequency that enable the system
to maintain stability even if you don't
know how all those little settings work
speaking of all the little settings
there's tweakers paradise which gives
you an enormous range of tweaking
options that most people like like sort
of probably a couple dozen people in the
entire world will never ever need but
they're there it's also got their CPR
boot recovery so it allows it to recover
and boot up without clearing seam else
allowing you to continue on your merry
way overclocking end
actually this is a bit of a new thing so
unlike many ROG products in the past it
has 4-way optimization which allows fan
speed CPU speed and power consumption to
be balanced and also includes their new
away mode which turns power consumption
way down when you're actually not right
there in front of the system the first
accessory we find in the Box is the OC
panel it's got a normal mode and you can
mount it in a five and a quarter inch
Bay in your system that gives you like a
post debug readout hardware monitor info
like temperatures and fan speeds and
allows you to change your fan profiles
on the fly or you can get crazy get
things into extreme mode which has
insane stuff like it provides leads that
you can run to make adjustments to up to
four graphics cards at a time - crazy
stuff like power switching frequency and
overcurrent protection
it's got sub-zero temperatures up zero
temperatures it gives you direct control
of key frequencies and voltages on the
fly and much more if you want a more
detailed overview we actually covered it
in the Maximus 6 extreme unboxing quite
a while ago this isn't the first time
we've seen OC panel and it's a very cool
little piece of hardware it plugs into a
proprietary port on supported boards
called ROG underscore ext accessory-wise
the seuss includes 2-way 3-way and
four-way SLI bridges as well as an ROG
branded crossfire bridge they include 10
SATA cables half of which are right
angle and half of which are straight
they include their Q connector for
easily plugging in your front panel
connectors as well as their dual den
magnetic antenna that plugs into the
back of the motherboard IO for your
Wireless implementation they include the
cable the custom cable that you need to
plug in the OC panel as well as an ROG
connect USB cable so that you can plug a
second computer usually a laptop into it
to monitor things that way if you prefer
not to use the OC panel they also
include an i/o shield an awesome metal
republic of gamers magnet that's
freaking amazing as well as a manual
driver disk that you can throw away and
of course that copy of Assassin's Creed
4 Black Flag they also include a
standard LGA 2011 backplate to go along
with the custom much more robust one
that they have pre-installed on the
board now onto the motherboard itself
the CPU socket is of course an LGA 2011
socket with full support for the latest
Extreme Edition process
SURS for power we've got an 8 pin and 4
pin connector that feeds the 8 plus
three-phase CPU power design with 60 amp
gold treated coating chokes this is the
best power delivery design that a soos
has ever implemented on a consumer-grade
motherboard hands down in fact even the
memory has been beefed up with 2+2 phase
power something that I've personally
never seen on a board before not only
that but the whole board features 100%
10,000 our lifetime black metallic caps
so it not only will run extremely well
it will do it for an extremely long time
moving allow along to the right hand
side of the board we have a post code
readout as well as onboard switches for
start and reset we can individually turn
our PCI Express 16x lanes on and off
with a bunch of dip switches here we've
also got the slo-mo dip switch which is
mostly for extreme overclocking our 24
pin connector and it's ideal location on
the right-hand edge our USB 3 connector
and it's ideal location on the
right-hand edge although I'd prefer to
see it at a right angle we've also got
10 SATA connectors six of which are say
2 3 6 gigabit per second 2 provided by
the Intel chipset 2 by as media chipsets
and then there are 4 SATA 2 connectors
we've got dual physical BIOS switches as
well as the rest of our front panel
connectors we have a BIOS switch for
switching in between those 2 bios's as
well as an easy plug down here at the
bottom so that's a 4-pin molex that
provides auxilary power if you're
installing more than a couple of
graphics cards speaking of a couple of
graphics pro cards we've got full
support for 4-way crossfire and four-way
SLI
with 16 X 8 X 8 X 8 X operation being
the maximum that it can run at or you
can go 16 X 16 X if you run in PCI
Express slots 1 & 5
I would like to backtrack a little bit
here and I want to show you guys what
they have done in terms of voltage
notifications as well as voltage check
points so their probe L voltage check
points have expanded from 7 voltages to
10 including allowing you to monitor the
voltages of add in video cards and their
vote minder to LED system not only now
indicates what kind of voltages things
are running at with different colors
representing more and more dangerous
voltages but it can also indicate which
voltage
an overclock to fail now that is an
extremely awesome feature and you'll
find that right around here on the side
it's become a pattern for rampage class
boards to have mediocre sound
implementations compared to Maximus
range boards in the past little while
but that is going out the window with
the black editions so they have put one
of their best audio implementations ever
on this particular board it starts with
the PC demote which is a separated PCB a
portion just for audio as well as PCB
shielding and a tin plated metal cover
on the supreme FX chip itself all of
this is to reduce interference it
follows up with Elma premium audio
capacitors as well as a new op-amp
design to reduce interference and make
the output cleaner they've also
implemented much better than usual front
audio so there's a separate front audio
DAC which is a Cirrus Logic CS 43 98
instead of HD audio and added a Texas
Instruments TP a 60 120 a2 headphone amp
for the front port so even the front
port can handle 600 ohm headphones not
only that but going along with their
supreme FX hardware is the software side
of things so they've got their radar
overlay to show you sounds forces
visually on the screen in front of you
along with their sound enhancer with
presets for gaming to key in on
footsteps bomb timer beeps or other
kinds of in-game noses as well as
profiles for the sound enhancer that you
can switch between on-the-fly and expert
to now has along with being able to set
you know custom fan curves and profiles
that are preset or whatever you want to
do now has full control of both DC and
PWM fans so this is something we haven't
seen before and all the fan headers are
located here here here here here here
here and here
so guys who is this board for because
it's extremely expensive it's for people
who want nothing but the absolute best
that's what it's for if you want to load
up 64 gigs of ram you want to put an
extreme edition in there and load in for
graphics cards and you want everything
to actually run correctly all the
components on this board are designed
for it to actually be loaded up I mean
even little simple things like the vrm
solution for the CPU is designed to give
off less interference when it's being
heavily
loaded so it's less likely to to cause a
problem with some other component of the
system that might also be working
extremely hard it's not made for you to
just kind of casually throw you know
eight gigs of ran in it and like one
graphics card and like you know the
lowest end CPU that fits in it this is
for the hardcore let's go around to the
back of the board I'll show you guys I
mean even the back plates are hardcore
there's back plates on the VRM backplate
saan what would typically be called the
Southbridge area back when I was you
know first getting into this stuff which
was an awful long time ago and then
let's finish up with IO so there's a ps2
keyboard mouse combo port I still love
to see this four USB 2.0 ports six USB
3.0 ports two eSATA ports gigabit
ethernet of course that has gain first
two as well as the onboard AC Audio 7.1
audio as well as optical audio out and
finally ROG Kinect as well as the clear
CMOS button built right into that
shrouded gorgeous back that's got a nice
big like heatsink attached to it and
like a nice heat pipe up here and man
this board looks good if you were to buy
a board based on just having the best
looking system on the block that would
be hard to recommend anything other than
the rampage for extreme black edition
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