Asus Rampage II Extreme Motherboard: Cue up the Battle Hymn of the Republica
Asus Rampage II Extreme Motherboard: Cue up the Battle Hymn of the Republica
Posted 10/30/2008 at 10:12am
| by Gordon Mah Ung
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We know what you’re thinking, what more could a motherboard vendor put on the PCB that would convince anyone to part with $400? Asus thinks its latest Rampage II Extreme board in the Republic of Gamer’s series will do it.
This X58-based Core i7 board features support both Tri-SLI and CrossFire X, six DDR3 DIMM slots, EAX 4.0 software support, an audio card riser, heat pipes, LCD poster displays and a joystick and probe ports to connect your multi-tester.
What the hell do you need a joystick on a mobo for? Using the provided small single-line LCD display, you can toggle voltages, overclocking profiles or clock speeds. Want even more insane features? The board features probe ports to connect a multi-meter to the motherboard to read direct voltages for the RAM, southbridge, PCI-E, CPU, QPI and CPU PLL’s.
One feature the board doesn’t have that we expected was support for Nvidia’s nForce 200 chip. Instead of the Nvidia hardware, Asus has SLI certification for up to three-way SLI in a x16/x8/x8 configuration. There’s no word as to whether Asus plans to offer a board with an nForce 200 part in it yet.
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Devo85x
November 01, 2008 at 2:49pm
I WANT ONE!!! It has plenty of options on it, and it looks amazing! My only question is, is this another board that has problems with having RAM voltages over 1.65?
ghot
October 30, 2008 at 3:08pm
How many more years will it take for the mobo manufacturers to make the RAM and PCI-E slots PARALLEL to each other? With RAM heatsinks reaching 2 inches in height....have the RAM and PCI-E slots perpendicular, is just plain "airflow" stupid!
I have an ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe WiFi mobo, and by some manufacturing accident....they put the RAM and PCI-E slots parallel. This of course means, that I can over clock on ONLY air cooling and still get fantastic low temps. For example, right now my CPU is 25C, my mobo is 24C and my GTX280 is 35C. All I run is a Zalman 9500 CPU cooler and 5 80mm case fans.....2 front intake, 2 rear exhaust and 1 side exhaust. I over clocked my AMD 5000+ black edition from 2.6 to 3.2Ghz. Even under 100% load, my temps only reach 40-45C ! It's all because there is no restriction to the front to back airflow. Sure I could spend excess money to achieve the same results, but why? A simple mobo redesign will do the same job for a whole lot less!
s3th
November 29, 2008 at 5:42am
Well actually the way a motherboard is made today is very economically excepted worldwide, of course it may say seem realistic to put the ram and pice e parallell for more room, airflow etc, and so your huge ddr3 dominator ram doesnt conflict with multiple GPU's along with water cooling or a heatsink. But im sure they make it that way for a reason and someone has already thought of that before actually making the motherboards and whatever design works best it goes into the motherboard.
Keith E. Whisman
October 30, 2008 at 12:56pm
I'm curious about running 2 video cards in SLI. Will it offer dual X16 sli with the top and bottom X16 slots and wont that block those connections on the bottom of the motherboard? If you use both Blue X16slots for dual SLI then you block that single PCI slot and you have to throw out your SB pci Xfi card. That would suck because I just got my SLI card a few months ago. Sounds cards usually last a couple of years at least for me. Other than that another question is what is the six memory slots for? Can you run dual tri Channel setups? err Dual Channel Tri Channel?
maniacm0nk3y
October 30, 2008 at 10:15am
If that was a tank it would destroy. Asus has bad ass heatsinks. They almost look like teeth.
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