Asus doesn't seem to be to concerned with Intel NDA's and launch dates, as the company has already announced two of its upcoming X58 motherboards, the high-end Rampage II Extreme and the P6T Workstation Professional.

Neither board is a mainstream product and with the Rampage II Extreme expected to retail for above €400, and the P6T WS Pro not far behind, there won't be too many customers for either board. We've already told you about most of the details of both of these boards and the press releases hold little news.

The Rampage II Extreme won't come with its own Voltage meter, which we think is a missed opportunity for Asus. Instead, it comes with a couple of headers that you can attach to the connectors on the motherboard for semi-permanent measurement points. You can also take readouts from the solder points in front of the little connectors.

We're somewhat perplexed about Asus's 12GB memory limitation, as the Core i7 processors support 24GB of memory; although this might have something to do with the overclocking, but we've yet to hear about any such limitations.

The P6T WS Pro will have a pair of PCI-X slots for anyone that has older cards that take advantage of this pre-PCIe interface. The board will also have a pair of SAS connectors that allows faster SAS hard drives to be used over SATA drives.

You can find the Rampage II Extreme press release here and the P6T WS Pro here


The Rampage II Extreme


The P6T Workstation Professional