Asus Rampage II Extreme
Pricey motherboard is a tweaker's dream come true
THE AS US RAMPAGE II EXTREME motherboard is the newest entry in the company's Republic of Garners line, offering slick looks and extensive support for overclocking. This pricey ($399) board based on Intel's X58 chipset supports Socket 1366 Intel Core i7 CPUs and is aimed at performance fiends for whom raw speed and configurability are more important than cost.
If you like to show off the insides of your PC, you'll be happy to know that the Rampage II Extreme's design screams performance. The black board is accented by gunmetal gray heat sinks with Ferrari red highlights, plus an LED-lit chipset cooler that looks a lot like an engine-block cover.
The board boasts three PCI Express (PCIe) x16 slots (which run in x16/x16 with two graphics cards or x16/x16/x8 with three cards) and supports both Nvidia SLI and ATI CrossFireX. Asus's other X58 board, the P6T Deluxe, has a board layout that restricts you to single-width graphics cards; the Rampage II Extreme can support three double-width cards.
The board also sports a pair of PCIe xl slots and a single PCI slot. Six memory slots support DDR3 DRAM at up to 1,800MIlz, and there are seven (yes, seven) SATA hard drive connectors as well as IDE and floppy ports. External expansion is robust as well, with 12 USB 2.0 ports (six of which are on the back panel), two FireWire ports, two Gigabit Ethernet ports, and an external SATA (eSATA) port.
Like the MSI X58 Eclipse, the Rampage II Extreme bundles an EAX-compatible PCIe xl sound card, offering better, cleaner audio quality than typical onboard sound solutions. But although MSI includes an actual low-end Creative X-Fi card, the Asus solution is based on the ADI AD2000B audio codec. Its X-Fi support is provided by the drivers, enabling EAX 4.0, Crystalizer, and other typical Creative functions through software. Sound quality is excellent; with a Core i7 CPU, any additional CPU usage by the drivers is going to go unnoticed.
The Rampage II Extreme includes an external LCD Poster status module that lets you view boot status and error messages. Rather than using USB the way the external display included with the P6T Deluxe does, the Rampage connects directly to the motherboard, so it starts working before the operating system loads. Any doubt that this board is aimed at extreme tweakers should be dispelled by the fact that the BIOS settings open directly on the overclocking screen. The big, red power button right on the board lets you test and tweak the board outside of a case, and it's accompanied by a reset button as
well as a small joystick that works with the LCD Poster to let you manually adjust voltages and clock speeds. If you don't trust the voltage readouts provided by the motherboard, a set of two-pin headers will allow technical users to measure voltage by connecting a rnultimeter directly to various subsystems, such as CPU and DRAM. The Voltiminder LEDs on the board offer color-coded warnings if you push voltage too high. The board has two BIOS chips. This offers security should a flash upgrade go awry, and Asus allows you to switch between two different BIOS versions. You could run one version when stability is key, and switch to a newer beta version when you want to push performance to the limit.
For performance enthusiasts not familiar with the minutiae of overclocking settings, Asus includes CPU Level Up software, which lets you easily select from preset overclocking levels. Testing with a 2.66GHz Core i7-920 processor and the stock Intel cooler, in conjunction with a 1,333MHz DDR3 Triple Channel Memory Kit from OCZ, we easily reached the same 3.34GHz speed we achieved with the Asus P6T motherboard, using only Auto settings for voltages. The system was stable as a rock at this speed, and with a better cooler and appropriate tweaking, there's no doubt the Rampage II Extreme could have pushed the processor much faster. 
The Rampage II Extreme is laden with overclocker treats. It's overkill for those who run their CPUs at stock speeds, but only the lack of full x16-channel support on all three PCIe graphics slots is likely to disappoint performance fiends. If you want to push your rig to the limit, this board is well-equipped and then some. —Denny Atkin
Computer Shopper March 2009
