14 DAY TRIAL // Together with Intel's release of Sandy Bridge-E, Asus made official the high-end ROG Rampage IV Extreme motherboard for LGA 2011 processors that targets enthusiasts, hardcore gamers and overclockers alike.
This is Asus' most advanced offering for the Sandy Bridge-E processors as it comes with an arsenal of features starting with USB 3.0 and Bluetooth connectivity, SATA 6.0Gbps support, and 7.1 channel audio.
To these technologies, Asus has a dded o series of other capabilities meant to cater to the needs of high-end users.
For starters, the CPU and the memory are powered by Asus' new Extreme Engine Digi+ II power design that promises to improve overclocking and allows the DIMMs installed in the eight memory slots to reach speeds in excess of DDR3-2400.
In case the memory gets overclocked to far, the system can be reset to the previous settings by using the now familiar Memo OK! Button, which is placed together with the usual Power, Reset and Clear CMOS switches, but also with a series of voltage reading points, and a button for enabling the special LN2 slow boot mode.
The board also comes with four PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots with support for 4-way CrossFireX and SLI setups and each one of these slots can be enabled or disabled via a series of DIP switches.
Another interesting overclocking tool is the so called OC Key which creates an overlay on the active DVI monitor to adjust overclock settings in real-time without using additional software or hardware (it connects to the GPUs DVI port).
The rest of the ROG Rampage IV Extreme features include support for monitoring a voltage modded graphics card in the TurboV EVO software and a special Subzero Sense connector with dual temperature reading ports for monitoring the CPU and GPU pots simultaneously.
Even though Asus announced the Rampage IV Extreme, the motherboard isn't yet available, but Newegg has listed it at $449.99 which roughly translates into 329.5 EUR.
