Features With a lofty $400+ price tag, the ASUS Rampage Extreme comes off as an elitist built for those with more money than brains. The reality is that the Rampage Extreme really does offer many things that no one else on the market does. Does this justify the price? Let's have a look at some of those features and begin drawing the answer to that question. At the Top of Game Board
 This isn't the first Republic Of Gamers motherboard from ASUS that we have looked at here at Hardware Canucks and if this one is anything like the last, we are certain to be impressed. The ROG logo symbolizes the best that ASUS has to offer for a specific chipset, the Rampage Extreme may just be the best ASUS has to offer...period. | PCI-E 2.0 Graphic Interface
 Forget about all the recent chatter regarding P45s 8X/8X CrossFire performance, with the Rampage Extreme and it's Intel X48 chipset, we get dual 16X/16X PCI-E 2.0 performance for un-restricted CrossFire performance. This will be put to the test when we take our test bed HD4850s and hunt for HWBot.org gold medals later on in the review. | Fusion Block System
 ASUS has gone over the top with their Fusion Block System on this motherboard providing enough options to satisfy everyone's needs, whether you water or air cool. Additional heat sinks for the PWM, and NB area provide unparallel cooling flexibility. The Fusion water block provides superior cooling potential for extreme overclocking. | iROG
 In an un-heard of step, ASUS has single handedly provided us with the most advanced hardware based motherboard control we have seen on the market. With the iROG chips, ASUS has basically provided hardware based control of voltages, overclocking, and hardware monitoring...right on the board. Voltage modifications need not apply as this board has them practically built in. | BIOS FlashBack
 What is better than a self recoverable BIOS setup...well naturally, two independent BIOSs. ASUS has again opened the door for possibilities unseen before on a consumer motherboard. With two physical BIOS chips on the board, users can boot to either one or restore one from the other. As we found out in our Extreme Overclocking section, this came in un-believably handy. | ASUS O.C. Profile
 In addition to two physical BIOS chips on the Rampage Extreme, as always, ASUS has provided us with the ability to not only save BIOS settings within the BIOS but also provided the ability to backup BIOS settings to thumb drives to be shared. This can also come in very handy for troubleshooting and opens the door for other hardware manufacturers to potentially provide complete BIOS settings to an end user, without typing out a single setting. | External LCD Poster
 The LCD Poster makes another appearance here at Hardware Canucks but this time, it does more than just show POST codes. The LCD Poster is an integral part of what the TweakIt feature accomplishes that we just discussed. The LCD Poster acts as a small screen for our voltage and FSB adjustments as well as for cycling through the various readouts. The TweakIt section is not something you will want to miss. | Connect in the dark!
 Being a bit of a novelty feature when compared to the other outstanding options this board offers, the illuminated rear I/O panel is actually quite useful. Personally, my main workstation is in the dark at the rear I/O panel and this type of setup would be ideal. We suspect many users will find this feature extremely helpful in the most frustrating of times. | Extreme Engine
 So we have a superior BIOS setup, superior cooling, and un-matched overclocking control, but do we have a motherboard that can really push the limits of overclocking? ASUS seems to think they have the answer for that question and many more with their ultra high-end components allowing for superior voltage stabilization when most needed as well as the ability to select extremely high voltages directly from the BIOS. Again, volt mods need not apply to this motherboard, even for the most extreme cooling conditions. | Speeding HDD
 The last item on the menu of features for the Rampage Extreme is this nice little feature that essentially takes the guess work out of running a RAID array. Simply plug two hard drives into the speeding ports and choose whether you want speed, or super speed and the software does the rest. |
As we mentioned, coming into this review we knew this motherboard was the class of the field offering more unique features than we have ever seen. ASUS has really done everything they can to ensure that the Rampage Extreme does not get knocked off the throne it has easily captured. The question still stands though, do these impressive features on paper live up to their hype? We will definitely be finding that out today, first, let's see some of the features we just talked about in the Package & Accessories section.
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