A Closer Look at the ASUS Rampage Formula

We have presented the major landscape markers of this motherboard and at first glance, everything seems to be well placed, spaced, and thoughtfully laid out. The one immediate identifying aspect of this motherboard is that all of the connectors are on the outside edge of the motherboard. The way high-end cases are designed these days for cable management, this type of layout is a must and facilitates ultra clean looking installs. The other thing of note but is not labeled on the map are the fan headers. The Rampage Formula has a whopping seven fan headers including the CPU fan header. Try and spot them all during the fly over.

The CPU socket on this motherboard is obviously surrounded by the Pin-Fin heat sink design. The heat sink wraps around three sides of the CPU socket, but despite this close proximity, there is plenty of room for large CPU coolers. Our 8-pin EPS connector for CPU power is located in the typical position right behind the rear I/O panel. The memory modules appear to have decent spacing from the CPU socket and are directly beside the mass of pins sitting on top of the northbridge. This will make it possible to place a single fan over the memory on an angle and get that air to blow over the massive heat sink as well. The floppy and 24-pin ATX connectors are also located in this area, nice and tight to the edge of the motherboard for easy cable management.

Travelling south on the Rampage Turnpike we reach the bottom edge of the motherboard and the southbridge area of the board. This area has a ton of input and output connections including our six SATA connectors placed on a 90 degree angle to the board. This makes for neat cable management if the case you are using has a cut-out here for cables to come from behind the motherboard tray, but it can also cause issues with really short cases where hard drives can back into this area. However, the included 90 degree SATA cables should help alleviate this potential issue. Along with the front panel connector, IDE connector, USB headers, and Firewire headers; the onboard power and reset buttons are located along the bottom edge. Like every other connector on this motherboard, they are nice and tight to the edge and stay out of the way of any expansion slots above them. There are also a couple of fan headers located down here which should allow most fans to reach from the front of the case.

As we saw from the overhead shot earlier, the PCI/PCI-E expansion area is nicely laid out. The PCI-E x16 slots are about as far away as they could be ensuring any combination of video card and cooler can fit in pairs for CrossFire. The PCI slots are also perfectly placed with one right near the top of the pile for those that prefer to use their own audio card.

The Winbond W83627DHG-A provides the I/O control of PS/2 keyboard, mouse, floppy drive, and serial devices amongst other things. It also provides Smart Fan control which is a very nice feature for a motherboard as control of fans from the BIOS with no CPU overhead or software which is always welcome. The VIA VT6308P is simply the IEEE 1394 Firewire controller and appears to only offer 100 / 200 / 400 Mbit connection speeds, so no Firewire 800 to be had with the onboard controller.

Right up beside the rear I/O panel we find our two Marvell 88E8056 gigabit network controllers. Usually ASUS goes with a Marvell and Realtek network controller but the Rampage Formula has two of the better and very common Marvell network controllers.

The rear I/O panel isn't overly populated but sure looks full thanks to the large heat sink and fins sticking out here. The other oddity is the inclusion of a small button under the heat sink fins. This is actually a Clear CMOS button so that we will have access to clearing the CMOS from outside of the case. In certain situations, this could be very handy but at the same time, with this button enabled, it wouldn't take much to accidentally reset your BIOS. Luckily, the button can be disabled with a jumper on the motherboard to protect against this.

We are now going to take a quick journey over this impressive Pin-Fin heat sink and heat pipe assembly that ASUS has put on this motherboard. It starts down here at the bottom of the board with the south bridge heat sink and is small, un-assuming, and covered by an ROG label. The reason for a low profile heatsink is to allow large video cards unimpeded access to the space above. The southbridge heatsink is connected to the largest mass on the motherboard via a heat pipe. This mass is where the Pin-Fin designation comes from. It is simply a massive finned heat sink that while being large and covering a lot of real estate on the board, doesn't really interfere with anything.

The large Pin-Fin heatsink sitting on the northbridge then gives way to a finnedheat sink that is connected via another heatpipe. These are the fins that are visible from the rear I/O panel and are not only connected to the northbridge heatsink, but also the lower profile heatsink sitting on the PWM MOSFETs. This MOSFET heat sink then reaches out to another MOSFET heat sink along the top edge of the board via another heatpipe. Despite being a standard formation, ASUS has gone to great lengths to provide adequate cooling for this motherboard without the addition of any fan noise.

The backside of the Rampage has nothing unusual to report on but it is very nice to see a back plate for the northbridge heat sink. As we saw in the previous images, the northbridge is secured with screws which is another welcome addition but the rest of the heatsinks are mounted with push pins. We would really like to see every heat sink mounted with screws to ensure good mounting pressure. Push pins are the norm but so many motherboards benefit from changing those out with screws and nuts that the push pins really should be ditched industry wide on enthusiast motherboards.