ASUS Rampage 4 Extreme Review

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Finally, here it is. The Rampage IV Extreme in the familiar red and black flesh, both with and without its cooling.

      

Considering the absolute art that was the heatsinks on both the Rampage III Extreme and Maximus IV Extreme, it’s a bit of a surprise to find the heatsinks on the R4E are fairly bland. Although the sheer volume of stuff, 8 DIMM slots, Quad PCIe, naturally reduces the real estate available for the more arty designs.

The chipset cooler we will talk about on the next page, but it’s worth taking a moment to appreciate the PCI Express slot layout. Most people will stick to a single or dual-GPU system and there is a lot of space between the first and third expansion slots, to give your card as much ventilation as possible.

      

No that isn’t a newfangled form of storage connection. We have the standard SATA 6Gbp/s and SATA 3Gbp/s storage options, supporting RAID 0,1,5 and 10. The small box to the right of the SATAII is for reading the temperature of the board, even in sub-zero conditions. So if you’re aiming for those world records, it’s all a little bit easier to monitor.

   

If there is one thing that any overclocking board needs it is lots of power, and the R4E is capable of drawing on a lot of juice thanks to an additional 4pin ATX power connector alongside the standard 8pin number, and nestled to the left of the first PCIe slot we have another 6 pin connector for even more juice.