ASUS Rampage Extreme X48 Motherboard Review

A Closer Look at the ASUS Rampage Extreme

The first thing that comes to mind when looking down on this board is wow, that is a lot of "stuff", for lack of a better word. The heat sink/heat pipe theme park and all of its subsidiary covers take up the majority of the landscape. There is also an additional heat sink on the vDIMM PWM circuit that matches the rest of the heat sink theme. The slot placement and spacing look good as does the hard drive ports but again we see a pair standing straight up which we don't like to see anymore, go 90 degree, or go home. The PCI-E 16X spacing is absolutely perfect for dual slot coolers or big chunks of copper. Let's start the fly by at heat sink central, the CPU socket.

Now despite how cramped and overwhelmed that poor little CPU socket looks, the heat sinks really aren't that intrusive. The height is good and should clear most large wing span heat sinks and they are far enough away that they should allow the lower level heatsinks plenty of room to breathe. We will see more about installation issues shortly in the install section, if there are any. Other than that, the new 16 phase PWM layout is very tidy and more than adequately cooled with the heat sinks provided. The 8-PIN CPU connection is tucked up there parallel to the top edge of the board. Like every other PWM zone on the Rampage Extreme, the vDIMM circuit get's its own heat sink along with a high capacity Fujitsu 3V-1000uF capacitor. This is just one of three on the board, all of which we will see in this section.

The ideal layout continues here beside the memory slots which are so far away from the CPU socket that they really are an afterthought. The floppy, IDE, and 24-pin ATX power connectors are all parallel with the motherboard edge and will make cable management a breeze. The IDE connector even goes as far as providing a 90 degree angle mount. The same on the floppy connector would be nice to see as well. Speaking of 90 degree connectors, 6 of the 8 total SATA II connectors are at a 90 degree angle, but a pair from the ICH9R south bridge are not. Perhaps there just wasn't room but at least they don't appear to interfere with either of the PCI-E 16X lanes.

The rest of this bottom corner is the central hub, host of the soutbridge, USB headers, front panel connectors, a fan header, both BIOS chips, and both iROG chips as well as the Silicon Image SIL5723 controller IC for the Speeding hard drives. There is also a switch to enable or disable the CMOS clear function of the button on the rear I/O panel.

The last item of interest tucked into the left corner of this image is the BIOS Flashback jumpers. Here we can set the jumper to either boot from BIOS 1, BIOS 2, or from the choice that is currently selected in the BIOS menu. Having two BIOSs is one thing, a jumper to decide which to boot to is a whole different ball park that no one else has entered but ASUS.

Right beside the BIOS Flashback jumpers are the Power, Reset, Select, Confirm, and Toggle buttons. The latter three are used for the TweakIt function that will have its own section a little later on. ASUS drops another first in the industry offering manual hardware controllable voltage and FSB selection. This feature is probably the biggest crowd pleaser and in reality, is a very nice feature when benching. Accurate temperature and voltage readings without the use of software for all major components...yes please.

In front of the PCI expansion slots we have the Winbond W83667HG-A multi I/O controller, VIA VT6308P firewire controller, and dual Marvell 88E8056 gigabit ethernet controllers. All of the listed component specification sheets should easily be found through some quick Google searches. Another pair of fan headers reside up here just below the rear I/O panel.

As we mentioned, the PCI-E 16X slot placement is about as slick as it gets in our opinion. Dual slot coolers should fit with plenty of room to breathe and a PCI slot at the very top will always allow for a PCI sound card to be used regardless of your GPU setup. The pair of PCI-E 1X slots in the middle should even be useable, well the bottom one at least, regardless of GPU cooler that is hanging off the card in the top 16X slot.

The large low profile heat sink sneaking into the photo is the start of the heat pipe assembly and does not interfere at all with expansion cards, but does cover a lot of surface area. This large surface area adds to the cooling ability without standing more than a centimeter above the boards surface. The heat sink also acts as a visual aid covering the heat pipe going up to the north bridge and providing room for more logos for ASUS to brand this board. The branding has indeed worked well because once you see this black aluminum mass on the board, you know you are looking at a Rampage Extreme.

Moving up the heat pipe highway, the northbridge is met with a very hefty heat sink combination that includes the Fusion water block sitting directly on top of the X48 chipset as well as a large pin fin heat sink borrowed from the Rampage Formulas playbook. This large secondary heat sink helps cool the entire heat pipe assembly but also provides ample cooling for the NB voltage regulation circuit including another one of the larger capacity Fujitsu capacitors we are about to see. Heat pipes then come out of this conglomeration of aluminum and copper and branch out to the heat sinks mounted on the top and bottom PWM banks for the CPU, each covering 8 phases of the MOSFETs. Overall, this setup is very beefy looking and appears to be quite capable of cooling this chipset but only testing of that will tell which happens a little later on.

Like we just said, the second of the large Fujitsu capacitors is found here underneath the heat sink assembly we just looked at. Removing the heat sink also reveals the three phase PWM circuit for the north bridge, and the thermal interface material that came from the factory on the north bridge. ASUS appears to have moved away from the thick grey thermal material that hardens to a rock like state with this board and uses just the blue thermal material we sometimes find in between the hard grey stuff and the heat sink on other ASUS boards. In the thermal testing of this setup, we actually replace this thermal material and do a slight modification to the entire assembly which provides some interesting insight into this setup.

The second photo above shows off the rather minimalistic rear I/O panel which includes 6 USB 2.0 ports, dual gigabit RJ-45 connectors, a 6-pin firewire connector, an e-SATA connector, and the CMOS reset button. Just to the left of the panel is the LCD Poster connection and yet another fan header.

The last of our photos is of the Rampage Extremes back side...don't worry, it is G rated. The last of the Fujitsu capacitors can be found directly behind the CPU socket which will force some installation issues that we will discuss in the next section. The rest of the back side is pretty standard but there is one thing to note, not a single pushpin is used in securing the heat sinks to the motherboard. This is what we have been waiting to see for so long here at Hardware Canucks, a motherboard heat sink assembly that is actually secured to the motherboard. Naturally we have found a fault in the design and if you look closely at the mounting screws you can see the slight modification we have made. Again, we will go over this with greater depth in the thermal testing section. Let's now get some hardware installed in this bad boy...or at least try anyway.