Asus Rampage IV Extreme Motherboard Review

The Rampage IV Extreme follows the standard ROG color scheme with a black PCB and red accent colors on the memory and expansion slots.  Overall layout is an Extended ATX with the standard set of expansion slots.

Flipping a motherboard over can tell you a lot about how it is constructed.   The board has a few components scattered around along with a black heatspreader directly under the two PWMs.  Due to the size of the LGA2011 socket the CPU reinforcement plate is considerably larger than what we have seen in the past.  This is due in part to having the heatsink mounting holes to the back of the motherboard instead of being located on top.  Personally we like this approach better as it will truly support the PCB and CPU socket after the heatsink has been installed.

It is a little difficult to see but the R4E comes with a monster digital PWM divided into four parts.  There are eight phases dedicated to the CPU and three phases dedicated to the processor QPI/DRAM.  Two phases are allocated to the North Bridge leaving two phases controlling the memory systems.  Together that adds up to a lot of power to keep track of which is something the ROG Extreme Engine Digi+ II can do automatically or you can choose to tweak the system using the UEFI controls or thru TurboV in Windows.

The cpu socket is a special Lotes part featuring the standard exposed metal finish.  We had fully expected to see a black chrome socket given abundance of dark capacitors scattered around the PCB but for what you lack in color you make up for in versatility. 

More on that later.

Unlike some X79 motherboards the Rampage IV Extreme features a full set of eight DDR3 memory slots, to accompany the quad channel memory controller, and support up to 64GB of system memory at speeds of up to 2400Mhz.  A side benefit to this memory configuration is that when running four memory modules you'll have room to run oversized CPU coolers and still keep your tall memory modules.