 🎵Music🎵 Welcome friends to my unboxing and overview of the Rampage 4 Extreme Black Edition. It's a Rampage 4 Extreme, but it's been updated in some significant ways. So memory speed has been upgraded from 2.4GHz max to 2.8GHz max. Their Extreme Engine Digi Plus VRM design has moved from their 2nd gen to their 3rd gen design. Game First 2 has been added to the onboard networking allowing your game packets to be prioritized. Bluetooth has been updated to 4.0 and they've added wireless AC which was not present on the original Rampage 4 Extreme. The BIOS has a Black Edition theme. There are 60A chokes versus the older Black Metallic chokes for the power design. Assassin's Creed 4 is in the box versus Battlefield 3 in the older one. There are 6 SATA 3 ports versus 4 SATA 3 ports in the older one. There are 8 USB 3 ports versus 6 USB 3 ports in the older one. And it comes with the OC panel versus the OC key for overclocking. It has a sub-zero temperature monitor. It's got a pause switch, VGA hotwire, 4 extra fan headers that you can attach fans to just like that on an exposed PCB and much more. So I'll tease you guys by holding the board here while I talk about some of the things that set ROG or Republic of Gamers apart because let's face it, boards are going to perform pretty much the same out of the box compared to each other these days. So ROG gets special attention. There's preset profiles from the ROG team for things like CPU and memory to give you great starting points when you're tweaking things on your own. There are excellent automatic management rules running in the background whenever you're making simple adjustments for a quick overclock to things like V-Core and CPU frequency that enable the system to maintain stability even if you don't know how all those little settings work. Speaking of all the little settings, there's Tweaker's Paradise which gives you an enormous range of tweaking options that most people, like shorter probably a couple dozen people in the entire world will never ever need, but they're there. It's also got their CPR boot recovery so it allows it to recover and boot up without clearing CMOS allowing you to continue on your merry way overclocking and actually this is a bit of a new thing so unlike many ROG products in the past, it has four-way optimization which allows fan speed, CPU speed and power consumption to be balanced and also includes their new away mode which turns power consumption way down when you're actually not right there in front of the system. The first accessory we find in the box is the OC panel. It's got a normal mode and you can mount it in a five and a quarter inch bay in your system that gives you like a post-debug readout, hardware monitor info like temperatures and fan speeds and allows you to change your fan profiles on the fly or you can get crazy and get things into extreme mode which has insane stuff like it provides leads that you can run to make adjustments to up to four graphics cards at a time to crazy stuff like power switching frequency and overcurrent protection. It's got sub-zero temp probes that actually plug right in here and allow you to monitor sub-zero temperatures. It gives you direct control of key frequencies and voltages on the fly and much more. If you want a more detailed overview we actually covered it in the Maximus 6 Extreme unboxing quite a while ago. This isn't the first time we've seen OC panel and it's a very cool little piece of hardware. It plugs into a proprietary port on supported boards called ROG underscore EXT. Accessory wise ASUS includes two-way, three-way and four-way SLI bridges as well as an ROG branded crossfire bridge. They include 10 SATA cables half of which are right angle and half of which are straight. They include their Q connector for easily plugging in your front panel connectors as well as their dual band magnetic antenna that plugs into the back of the motherboard I.O. for your wireless implementation. They include the cable, the custom cable that you need to plug in the OC panel as well as an ROG connect USB cable so that you can plug a second computer usually a laptop into it to monitor things that way if you prefer not to use the OC panel. They also include an I.O. shield, an awesome metal Republic of Gamers magnet that's freaking amazing as well as a manual driver disc that you can throw away and of course that copy of Assassin's Creed 4 Black Flag. They also include a standard LGA 2011 backplate to go along with the custom much more robust one that they have pre-installed on the board. Now on to the motherboard itself. The CPU socket is of course an LGA 2011 socket with full support for the latest Extreme Edition processors. For power we've got an 8-pin and 4-pin connector that feeds the 8 plus 3-phase CPU power design with 60 amp gold treated coating chokes. This is the best power delivery design that ASUS has ever implemented on a consumer grade motherboard hands down. In fact even the memory has been beefed up with 2 plus 2-phase power something that I've personally never seen on a board before. Not only that but the whole board features 100% 10,000 hour lifetime black metallic caps so it not only will run extremely well it'll do it for an extremely long time. Moving along to the right hand side of the board we have a postcode readout as well as onboard switches for start and reset. We can individually turn our PCI Express 16x lanes on and off with a bunch of dip switches here. We've also got the slow mode dip switch which is mostly for extreme overclocking. Our 24-pin connector in its ideal location on the right hand edge. Our USB 3 connector in its ideal location on the right hand edge although I prefer to see it at a right angle. We've also got 10 SATA connectors six of which are SATA 3 6 gigabit per second, two provided by the Intel chipset, two by Asmedia chipsets and then there are four SATA 2 connectors. We've got dual physical BIOS switches as well as the rest of our front panel connectors. We have a BIOS switch for switching in between those two BIOSes as well as an easy plug down here at the bottom so that's a four pin molex that provides auxiliary power if you're installing more than a couple of graphics cards. Speaking of a couple of graphics cards we've got full support for four-way crossfire and four-way SLI with 16x 8x 8x 8x operation being the maximum that it can run at or you can go 16x if you run in PCI Express slots one and five. I would like to backtrack a little bit here and I want to show you guys what they have done in terms of voltage notifications as well as voltage checkpoints. So their ProBelt voltage checkpoints have expanded from seven voltages to ten including allowing you to monitor the voltages of add-in video cards and their VoltMinder 2 LED system not only now indicates what kind of voltages things are running at with different colors representing more and more dangerous voltages but it can also indicate which voltage caused an overclock to fail now that is an extremely awesome feature and you'll find that right around here on the side. It's become a pattern for Rampage class boards to have mediocre sound implementations compared to Maximus range boards in the past little while but that is going out the window with the Black Edition so they have put one of their best audio implementations ever on this particular board. It starts with the PCB mode which is a separated PCB portion just for audio as well as PCB shielding and a tin-plated metal cover on the SupremeFX chip itself all of this is to reduce interference. It follows up with Elna premium audio capacitors as well as a new op-amp design to reduce interference and make the output cleaner. They've also implemented much better than usual front audio so there's a separate front audio DAC which is a Cirrus Logic CS4398 instead of HD audio and added a Texas Instruments TPA6120A2 headphone amp for the front port so even the front port can handle 600 ohm headphones. Not only that but going along with their SupremeFX hardware is the software side of things so they've got their radar overlay to show you sound sources visually on the screen in front of you along with their sound enhancer with presets for gaming to key in on footsteps, bomb timer beeps or other kinds of in-game noises as well as profiles for the sound enhancer that you can switch between on the fly. Fan Expert 2 now has along with being able to set you know custom fan curves and profiles that are preset or whatever you want to do now has full control of both DC and PWM fans so this is something we haven't seen before and all the fan headers are located here here here here here here here and here so guys who is this board for because it's extremely expensive it's for people who want nothing but the absolute best that's what it's for if you want to load up 64 gigs of ram you want to put an extreme edition in there and load in four graphics cards and you want everything to actually run correctly all the components on this board are designed for it to actually be loaded up i mean even little simple things like the VRM solution for the CPU is designed to give off less interference when it's being heavily loaded so it's less likely to to cause a problem with some other component of the system that might also be working extremely hard it's not made for you to just kind of casually throw you know eight gigs of ram in it and like one graphics card and like you know the lowest end CPU that fits in it this is for the hardcore let's go around to the back of the board and i'll show you guys i mean even the back plates are hardcore there's back plates on the VRM back plates on what would typically be called the southbridge area back when i was you know first getting into this stuff which was an awful long time ago and then let's finish up with IO so there's a PS2 keyboard mouse combo port i still love to see this four USB 2.0 ports six USB 3.0 ports two eSATA ports gigabit ethernet of course that has game first two as well as the onboard AC audio 7.1 audio as well as optical audio out and finally ROG connect as well as the clear CMOS button built right into that shrouded gorgeous back that's got a nice big like heat sink attached to it and like a nice heat pipe up here and man this board looks good if you were to buy a board based on just having the best looking system on the block then it would be hard to recommend anything other than the rampage for extreme black edition thanks for watching this video like it if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment letting me know what you think of this board and for that matter premium boards in general and last but not least as always don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos.