 Just when you thought it was impossible to cram more features into a motherboard, Asus brought out the Rampage 4 Extreme. So this particular one comes with a full copy of Battlefield 3. It is PCIe Gen 3 ready, which comes along with the territory because this is an Intel GA2011 socket motherboard with the X79 chipset supporting Core i7 Extreme and Core i7 processors on this socket. That is 6 core processors only so far, although there should be 4 core processors and even more core processors coming in the future. 4-way SLI and Crossfire support and a wide, wide range of other features. So let's get started here. Actually you know what? Let's open up the board first. I'm going to like shake things up a little bit here and I'm going to go ahead and get the board open. I'm going to get the board out of the box, which you can see through the box fairly well anyway so it's not a huge issue one way or the other. We will talk about features as we show them on the kit. There we go. Alright, so the motherboard. Let's do the accessories, then we'll do the board itself and the features when we are done with the accessories. So accessories, I'm going to have to cover some of the features here as well. So check this out you guys. This is the LGA2011 backplate. So why does it have an LGA2011 backplate in the box you might ask? Well that is actually because of a feature called X-socket which allows you to install either an LGA2011 native cooler or actually if we just open up recently closed tabs here, X-socket there we go, or if you check out the event.asus.com slash 2011 slash rog slash X-socket website, you can actually see third party coolers that support their X-socket technology which allows you to install your 1366 cooler on LGA2011 boards that include X-socket technology which as far as I know is just this one. Okay, what else we got here in terms of accessories? Gamer UI, gamer style, the choice of champions, so here's a little ROG. Oh look at that, it's all shiny and like silvery, you put that somewhere nice. Okay, we got the Battlefield 3 game which you guys can't see the code for. We have a 3-way SLI bridge, a 4-way SLI bridge, a 2-way SLI bridge, nice flexible black cable, perfect, and finally a crossfire bridge, once again black, perfect. Okay, we've got their, what are they calling this now? Pro belt, okay so that allows you to quickly check your voltages on a variety of things which we'll see when we open up the board. We got our IO shield, we've got ROG connect which allows you to overclock your CPU and change settings using the USB connection and an additional computer. We have the Oxnar or Zonar sound card so apparently this board includes Zonar technology, fascinating, either that or this is just, oh no this seems to be just like an ad for it. Oh, interesting. Next we have a lanyard, cool, it's a Battlefield 3 lanyard. This is cool, we'll get to this after. ROG connect cable, USB cable of some sort, oh this is for the OC key which is also part of that so we'll get to that later. Okay we've got 1, 2, 3, 4 USB, our SATA 3 6 gigabit per second cables, those are all right angle, and then we have 1, 2, 3, 4 SATA 2 3 gigabit per second cables and those are all right angle as well. Finally Q connectors which allow you to do your front panel and at least one front USB connector with additional ease and now let's just go ahead and throw these back in here and then let's whip out the board itself because the board is what you folks all paid good money to see and by paid good money I mean didn't pay anything at all. Here we go. So this is not quite a standard ATX board, we've seen ASUS doing this with their Republic of Gamers level boards for quite some time where they're widening the board just a smidgen in order to cram on more features so you can see here is where we would normally have the board ending and ASUS has put about another couple centimeters of PCB where they've put a lot of useful things. Why don't we start with the CPU socket? So there's our LGA 2011 socket that is a supporting Core i7 and Core i7 Extreme processors and where is the... you know what I'm going to be perfectly honest with you guys. See here's the back plate that's on here now. I actually don't understand exactly how X socket is going to work based on what I've seen so far but the theory is that it does work and that's good. Okay, as long as the cooler supports it so that's the key part. Around the sides of the socket we have our eight DIMM slots so yes ASUS has managed even on their top tier performance board to provide eight DIMM slots. If you are installing only four DIMM's I would definitely recommend you use the red slots because those ones are slightly further away from the CPU socket giving you a little bit more room for bulky coolers and a little bit of additional airflow around your socket. Speaking of coolers we've got our VRM coolers here and here ASUS has integrated their new generation of Digi Plus VRM on this particular board which means that you have dedicated digital voltage regulators not only for the CPU but also for the memory which just means additional components that they had to build into this board. You can actually, I mean you can clearly see how dense the PCB is. Every square inch of it is covered with something. CPU power connectors we have one 8 pin and one 4 pin connector. You do not have to use both of them although I would recommend if you're going to do any serious overclocking on this board which I hope you're doing if you're buying this board that you probably connect both of them. Moving down this side of the board we have an LED post readout. We have slow mode, I would probably leave that off for the most part, LN2 mode which is the jumper right here, CPU frequency, okay where does that one lead? I can't even see where some of these lead. Fascinating. Okay well here's all the voltage checkpoints so you can check DRAM, CD, DRAM AB, PCH 1.5, PCH 1.1, VTT, VSA, V-Core and you've got two grounds available. We have onboard start and reset switches. We also have the ability to turn on or off. I believe these are all of the PCI Express, here, the red PCI Express slots although I will double check that for you guys. We have the traditional go button right here. We've got our 24 pin connector in its ideal location along the right hand edge. Front USB 3 in what I would consider to be its ideal location along the right hand edge. Sub zero sense, this is fascinating. So sub zero sense right here allows you to detect the board temperatures even when you are well below zero. So no matter how cold you are in theory this will tell you the temperatures that you need to know. We have four SATA 2 3 gigabit per second and four SATA 3 6 gigabit per second ports. So two of those are running off the Intel chipset or rather all four of those are running off the Intel chipset so that is ideal. We also have an active cooler on the chipset here which is connected by heat pipe to another active cooler and our passive heat sink and the other passive heat sink and finally the other passive heat sink that I showed you guys already so it's like a chain of heat pipes leading all the way down here. Alright keeping on moving. This button switches which BIOS you are using so this is a multi BIOS board if you do happen to corrupt your BIOS you can switch to the other one. There's your front panel connectors, another front USB 3 and one two USB 2 front panel headers. Finally moving over here there's your two BIOS chips. There is your front panel audio and how many 4 pin PWM connectors do we have on this board? We have one here. Just zoom out far so that they can kind of see where they are. There's one here, one here that's two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight 4 pin PWM connectors. That's outstanding. Awesome. Love to see it. More of those is always better in my mind. So here let's have a look at the PCI Express slot layout. So it is ideally laid out for 4 way SLI or 4 way crossfire in an ATX or semi ATX form factor. Remember XL ATX boards are about this much longer but ASUS wants you to actually be able to install this board in any number of different cases. So what you will need to do 4 way SLI or crossfire is you will need a case like the 800D from Corsair that has maybe 7 expansion slots but at least like some extra space at the bottom so that the bottom card can hang over a little bit. So you can install if you're running 2 way SLI or crossfire you will be able to install those two cards plus an additional 1, 2, 3 PCIe 16x slots of which they are all wired at 8x. Remember, X79 is 16x, 16x or it is 16x, 8x, 8x or it is 8x, 8x, 8x, 8x in the way that the PCI Express slots are going to be split up. Here we have a couple of auxiliary power connectors. There's a 6 pin as well as a 4 pin floppy auxiliary power connector. And let's move around to the back panel of the board before we start to go over some of the features that I haven't necessarily quite covered yet. So 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 USB 2.0 ports, a PS2 keyboard mouse combo port, clear CMOS button. There's also another one here if for whatever reason the back panel is not convenient enough for you. We also have an ROG connect button so that's this port right here. You use that to do overclocking on another computer connected to this one. There is Bluetooth which also allows you to do overclocking but that's via your iPad or iPhone or I guess iPod touch would probably also support it so you can use the app to do that. We've got an eSATA port here, another eSATA port there, gigabit ethernet, 4 USB 3.0, 7.1 audio out including optical audio out. So let's see if there's any features here that I have sort of missed. There are some LEDs built into this board that are going to remind you about your voltages or just kind of warn you about your voltages more like it. And right, this one, haha, OC-Key. So OC-Key is actually just a straight DVI pass through so you see this and this and then you have to connect it via USB whether you do it this way or with the internal style connector so you can see this right here. And what OC-Key does is it overlays your BIOS settings on top of the image that your video card is already outputting. So what that means is you can actually see, rather than just relying on this guy right here, the little post readout, you can actually see status updates about your PC. You can change settings without even interfering with whatever you're doing on the screen behind the overlay. So it's kind of like if you have a home theater and you have a receiver that has an overlay to change whatever settings at the hardware level but it doesn't actually affect the media that's playing back in the background and then you can just shut it off at will. So that is the OC-Key. I think that's pretty cool. Let me see if there's anything that I've kind of missed here. So this is hardware driven so you can tweak your system on the fly and the OSD monitor. Right, okay, I already talked to you guys. So this allows you to monitor whatever information you want as well. Talked about Digi Plus 2 which means that you've got, okay, hold on, let's see if I missed anything. So Japan made 10K black metallic capacitors. These are rated for 105 degrees and Asus figures they'll last up to five times longer than regular solid caps. These guys down here with all the cooling all over them. Ah, VGA hotwire. Oh, I can't believe I missed this one right here. So VGA hotwire is these headers right here. This allows you to actually overvolt your GPUs through the Asus utility rather than connecting variable resistors to the back of the board and adjusting the little dials. So you have to do all the same solder points. You still have to do the work. It doesn't support just like overvolting your GPU through the PCI Express lot or anything like that. So what it does allow you to do is it allows you to adjust those settings using the motherboard. So that is very, very cool. What else do we have here? And I think that pretty much covers it. Nope, there's one more thing. So USB BIOS flashback without even a CPU or RAM installed in the system. You throw a USB key in there. You rename the file to the correct name. You check the manual to make sure you've got it all set up right. And you can actually flash the BIOS in the worst case scenario, which is everything went as wrong as it can go and you can completely restore it to a new BIOS. A couple more cool features. Sorry, battery died. Is you can actually see the status of any cards that are installed in the PCI Express lots in the BIOS. This isn't a new feature on this board, but it is one that I have seen on previous Asus boards like the Crosshair 5 that is very useful for diagnosing video card problems, especially if you have water cooling blocks on there. And I think that pretty much covers it. Thank you for checking out my unboxing of the Rampage 4 Extreme. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.