Published in Transportation

ASUS Rampage Extreme gets previewed

by on08 July 2008

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One feature packed board

Although we did tell you about the Rampage Extreme during Computex last month, Xfastest has scored a lot of nice high-res shots of the board, it's features and packaging which reveals a fair few details we didn't know about this motherboard.

It's the first time we've seen a motherboard that ships with an extra set of heatsinks, which are meant for those that don't intend to use watercooling with the board. It does of course have all the features you'd expect from an Asus R.O.G. motherboard, but it seems like Asus has thrown in just about everything but the kitchen sink this time.

The Extreme FX audio riser has been upgraded with software EAX 4.0 HD support, it's not using a real X-Fi chip as with some MSI products, so expect there to be a slight performance hit using EAX with this audio solution.

There's no real information about how the TweakIt buttons work, apart from that you can adjust the performance of the motherboard while you're running benchmarks, which still sounds very dodgy to us. Asus has also for the first time added a second BIOS chip to its motherboard which allows you to store a "safe" setting in one BIOS chip while you can overclock your system and save those settings to the other BIOS.

There are also a pair of iROG chips on the motherboard, but the text on the packaging isn't very clear as to what these are for, apart from it enabling some kind of ROG features, but it appears to have something to with overclocking and system monitoring.

Asus has also added a new type of ML capacitors to the Rampage Extreme, which seems like a bold move, as untested technology rarely end up on a super high-end motherboard the first time around. However, Asus seem confident enough about these new type of capacitors, but time will tell if they add any benefit over a more traditional design.

Asus has also added a space for owners of this board to sign their name on, although we're not sure why anyone would really want to do this, but there you go. There's still no word on price on this board, but we'd expect it to come in at around €250-300.

You can find loads and loads of pictures of the board here

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