Gadgetory

just when you thought it was impossible to cram more features into a motherboard a soos brought out the rampage for extreme so this particular one comes with the full copy of battlefield 3 it is PCIe gen3 ready which comes along with the territory because this is an Intel LGA 2011 socket motherboard with the x79 chipset supporting core x i7 extreme and Core i7 processors on this socket that is six core processors only so far although there should be four core processors and even more core processors coming in the future four-way SLI and crossfire support and a wide wide range of other features so let's get started here actually you know what let's let's open up the board first I'm gonna like shake things up a little bit here and I'm gonna go ahead I'm gonna get the board open I'm gonna get the board out of the box which you can see through the box fairly well anyway so it's not not a huge issue one way or the other but we will talk about features as we show them on this there we go alright so the motherboard let's do the accessories then we'll do the board itself and the features when we are done with the accessories so accessories I'm gonna have to cover some of the features here as well so check this out you guys this is the LGA 2011 backplate Oh so why does it happen LGA 2011 backplate in the box you might ask well that is actually because of a feature called X socket which allows you to install either elde an LGA 2011 native cooler or actually if we just open up recently closed tabs here X socket there we go or if you check out these if you check out the event on this use calm slash 2011 / ROG / x - socket website you can actually see third party coolers that support their X socket technology which allows you to install your 1366 cooler on LG 2011 boards that include at socket technology which as far as I know is just this one okay what else we got here in terms of accessories gamer UI gamer style to trace a champion so there's a little ROG look at that it's all shiny and like silver you put that somewhere nice okay we got the battlefield 3 game which you guys can't see the code for we have a 3-way SLI bridge a 4 Way SLI bridge a two-way SLI bridge nice flexible black cable perfect and finally a crossfire bridge once again black perfect okay we've got there what are they calling this now Pro belt okay so that allows you to quickly check your voltages on a variety of things which will see when you open up the board without our i/o shield we've got our OG connect which allows you to overclock your cpu and change settings using the USB connection and an additional computer we have the Oxnard or zone our sound card so apparently this board includes zone our technology fascinating either that or this is just oh no this seems to be just like an ad for it Oh interesting next we have a lanyard full the battlefield battlefield 3 lanyard this is cool we'll get to this after Taji connect cable ah USB cable with some sort oh this is for the OSI key which is also part of that so we'll get to that later okay we've got one two three four USB R SATA 3 six gigabit per second cables those are all right angle and then we have one two three four SATA it's a two to three gigabit per second cables and those are all right angle as well finally Q connectors which allow you to do a front panel and at least one front USB connector with additional ease and now let's just go ahead and throw these back in here and then let's whip out the board itself because the board is what you folks all paid good money to see and I paid good money I mean didn't anything at all here we go so this is not quite a standard ATX board we've seen Asus doing this with their Republic of gamers level boards for quite some time where they're widening the board just a smidgen in order to cram on more features so you can see here is where we would normally have the board ending and asus has put about another couple centimeters of PCB where they've put a lot of useful things why don't we start with the cpu socket so there's our LGA 2011 socket that is a supporting core i7 and core i7 extreme processors and where is the you know what I'm going to be perfectly honest with you guys see here's the backplate that's on here now I actually don't understand exactly how X socket is going to work based on what I've seen so far but the theory is that it does work and that's good okay as long as the cooler supports it so that's that's the key part around the sides of the socket we have our eight DIMM slots so yes asus has managed even on their top tier performance board to provide a Dem slots if you are installing only four dims I would definitely recommend you use the red slots because those ones are slightly further away from the CPU socket giving you a little bit more room for bulky coolers and a little bit of additional airflow around your socket speaking of coolers we've got our vo RM coolers here and here Asus has integrated their new generation of digi+ vrm on this particular board which means that you have dedicated digital voltage regulators not only for the CPU but also for the memory which just means additional components that they had to build into this board you can actually I mean you can clearly see how dense the PCB is every square inch of it is covered with something CPU power connectors we have one eight pin and one four pin connector you do not have to use both of them although I would recommend if you're going to do any serious overclocking on this board which I hope you're doing if you're buying this board that you probably connect both of them moving down this side of the board we have an LED post readout we have slow mode I probably leave that off for the most part ln2 mode which is the jumper right here ah CPU frequency okay where's that one lead can't even see where some of these lead fascinating okay well here's all the voltage check point so you can check DRAM CD DRAM ad PCH 1.5 PCH 1.1 vtt VSA v core and you've got two grounds available we have on board start and reset switches we also have the ability to turn on or off I believe these are all of the PCI Express here the red PCI Express slots although I will double check that for you guys we have the traditional go button right here we've got our 24-pin connector in its ideal location along the right-hand edge front USB 3 in what I would consider to be its ideal location along the right-hand edge Sub Zero sense this is fascinating so Sub Zero sense right here allows you to detect the board temperatures even when you are well below zero so no matter how cold you are in theory this will tell you the temperatures that you need to know we have 4 SATA 2 3 gigabit per second and four SATA 3 6 gigabit per second port so two of those are running off the Intel chipset or rather for all four of those are running off the Intel chipset so that is ideal we also have an active cooler on the chipset here which is connected by heat pipe to another active cooler and our passive heat sink and the other passive heat sink and finally the other passive heat sink that I showed you guys already so it's like a chain of heat pipes leading all the way down here alright keeping on moving this button switches which BIOS you're using so this is a multi BIOS board if you do happen to corrupt your BIOS you can switch to the other one there's your front panel connectors another front USB three and one two USB to front panel headers finally moving over here there's your two BIOS chips there is your front panel audio and how many four pin PWM connectors do we have on this board we have one here just zoom out far so that they can kind of see where there's one here one here that's two three four five six seven eight 4-pin pwm connectors that's that's outstanding awesome love to see it more of those is always better in my mind so here let's have a look at the PCI Express slot layout so it is ideally laid out for four-way SLI or four-way cross fire in an ATX or civil semi ATX form factor remember excel ATX boards are about this much longer but Asus wants you to be actually be able to install this board in any number of different cases so what you will need to do four-way SLI or crossfire is you will need a case like the 800 D from Corsair that has maybe seven expansion spots but at least like out some extra space at the bottom so that the bottom card can hang over a little bit so you can install if you're running two-way SLI or crossfire you will be able to install those two cards plus an additional one to three PCIe 16x slots of which they are all wired at 8 X remember X 79 is 16 X 16 X or it is 16 X 8 X 8 X or it is 8 X 8 X 8 X 8 X in the way that the PCI Express slots are going to be split up here we have a couple of auxiliary power connectors here's a 6 pin as well as a four pin floppy auxiliary power connector and let's move around to the back panel of the board before we start to go over some of the features that I haven't necessarily quite covered yet so 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 USB 2.0 ports a ps2 keyboard mouse combo port clear CMOS button there's also another one here if for whatever reason the back panel is not convenient enough for you we also have an ROG connect button so that's this port right here you use that to do overclocking on another computer connected to this one there is Bluetooth and which also allows you to do overclocking but that's via your iPad or I phone or I guess iPod touch would probably also support it so you can use the app to do that we've got an eSATA port here another eSATA port there gigabit ethernet 4 USB 3.0 7.1 audio out including optical audio out so let's see if there's any features here that I have sort of missed there are some LEDs built into this board that are going to remind you about your voltages or just I guess warn you about your voltage is more like it and write this one ha OC key so OC key is actually just a straight DVI pass-through so you see this and this and then you have to connect it via USB whether you do it this way or with the internal style connector so you can see this right here okay and what OSI key does is it overlays your bio settings on top of the image that your video card is already outputting so what that means is you can actually see rather than just relying on this guy right here the little post post readout you can actually see status updates about your PC you can change settings without even interfering with whatever you're doing on the screen behind the overlay so it's kind of like if you have a home theater and you have a receiver that has an overlay to change whatever settings that at the hardware level but it doesn't actually affect the media that's playing back in the background and then you can just you know shut it off at will so that is the OSI key I think that's pretty cool let me see if there's anything that I've kind of missed where so this is hardware driven so you can tweak your system on the fly and the OSD monitor right okay I already talked to you guys so this allows you to monitor whatever information you want as well talked about digi+ to which means that you've got okay hold on let's see if I missed anything so Japan made 10k black metallic capacitors these are rated for a hundred and five degrees and asu's figures they'll last up to five times longer than regular solid caps these guys down here with all the cooling all over them VGA hot wire oh I can't leave I missed this one right here so vga hot wire is these headers right here this allows you to actually over volt you're over volt your GPUs through the Asus utility rather than connecting variable resistors to the back of the board and adjusting the little dials so you soldered you have to do all the same solder points you still have to do the work it doesn't support just like overall ting your GPU through the PCI Express slot or anything like that but what it does allow you to do is it allows you to adjust those settings using the motherboard so that is very very cool what else do we have here for waking and I think that pretty much covers it nope there's one more thing so USB BIOS flashback without even a CPU or Ram installed in the system you throw a USB key in there you rename the file to the correct name you check the manual to make sure you've got it all setup right you can actually flash the BIOS in the worst case scenario which is everything went as wrong as it can go and you can completely restore it to a new biome couple more cool features sorry battery died is you can actually see the status of any cards that are installed in the PCI Express slots in the BIOS this isn't a new feature on this board but it is one that I have seen on previous AC sports like the crosshair 5 that is very useful for diagnosing video card problems especially if you have water cooling blocks on there and I think that pretty much covers it thank you for checking out my unboxing of the rampage four extreme don't forget to 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