ASUS' Rampage IV Extreme is just about the perfect motherboard

To the delight of users, the motherboard arena has improved immensely over the past few years. Fear of memory incompatibility is a thing of the past, obscure crashes and failures are ultra rare, and we've come as far as having devices that can remain amazingly reliable well beyond design specifications. Mounting a large cylindrical pot on a CPU and filling it with LN₂ isn't only expected in this day and age, but catered for. The area around a CPU is often left clear to ensure maximum accessibility, and there's features such as ASUS's 'LN₂ mode' which combat the dreaded 'cold bug' when taking the temperature below the functional limits of the CPU.

With the Rampage IV Extreme, this focus on extreme users is made crystal clear. The motherboard features all the goodies you'd expect such as a debug display, quick access to power buttons, dual switchable BIOS's and voltage read points. ASUS could have easily left it there, and just rehashed the X58 based Rampage III Extreme for the new X79 platform. To our delight, we got some new features to play with, namely OC Key, Subzero Sense and VGA Hotwire.

OC Key gives users the ability to monitor and tweak the motherboard by connecting a small device to a DVI port on your GPU. It sounds insane, but the justification is that it removes the need to waste CPU cycles during benchmarks. Heck, you can overclock the processor and/or GPU whilst the benchmark runs! You can see it in action here: http://goo.gl/KNw4r.

Subzero Sense is essentially two onboard thermometers to aid the monitoring of CPU and GPU cooling pots. Unfortunately the K-type thermocouple component required to take the readings isn't bundled with the board. Without them you can only read in the ambient temperature at the port itself. Interestingly, ASUS claim that the connector can measure a temperature range from -200 to 1350^oC with a sensitivity of 41 μV/C.

Now we come to VGA Hotwire. This is probably the least novice friendly feature we've seen yet. It involves using a soldering iron to attach a 2-wire cable to the voltage points of your GPU. When connected to the motherboard, you can monitor the GPU voltages directly, and even make adjustments in real-time using the BIOS, OC Key or Turbo V interfaces. Friggin' insane, if you don't mind us saying so.

The Rampage IV offers a total of 8 DIMM slots for up to 64GB of quad-channel action. That's a lot of VMs! If you want to expand to a ridiculous GPU setup like quad-SLI or 4-way CrossfireX, this board has you covered. It's also ready for a PCI-e 3.0 compliant processor.

Available I/O ports and buttons include combo PS/2, 2 x 6Gb/s eSATA, LAN, 4 x USB 3.0, 8 x USB 2.0, S/PDIF out, 5 x audio jacks, clear CMOS, ROG Connect and Bluetooth switches. The bundle consists of standard kit, plus the OC Key and an X-Socket mount (so you can reuse 1366 coolers).

When it came to overclocking, we were simply blown away. The level of control provided by this board is overwhelming to say the least. We did chuckle at the various 'paradise' sections of the BIOS, for example, "CPU Tweakers' Paradise". There's enough variables there to drive any tinkerer mad!

To overclock our 3960X, we opted to start at 'normal OC' optimized profile. We found that the 'Extreme OC' profiles were too aggressive for our particular chip. This set LLC to medium and increased the current limits by 10%. We pushed the voltage up to 1.5v and attempted to boot at 4.5GHz (approximately the clock rate we achieved on the G1.Assassin2). Prime95 was happy with that, and 4.6GHz, and even 4.7GHz! At this point we found that increasing the current limits and tweaking  VTT voltage improved reliability of our benchmarks. An interesting phenomenon was occurring where one of the cores would do very little work (if any at all). No errors or crashing, just plain old refusal to function. We're not sure if this is a feature to maintain stability (we had turned off all power saving technologies), or just an odd fluke, but adding an extra 0.01v appeared to fix it.

ASUS have produced many stunning motherboards in the past. If this board is anything to go by, we expect to see this trend continue well into the future. The only gripe we have is the price, but if you're willing to pay over a grand for the CPU alone, this probably doesn't concern you. If you're a professional overclocker or a multi-GPU fanatic, there's simply no better option at this time.