ASUS Rampage Extreme X48 Motherboard Review

Hardware Installation

Now in its proper place in the review, the installation section is basically concerned about one thing...problems. These will be those things we wanted to test during the fly over that caught our eye or things that we encountered over the course of the review. As always, we start with the question, does the Thermalright Ultra-120 fit? If so, in which orientation?

Going from top to bottom or bottom to top, the Ultra-120 has no problems with the heat sinks around the socket area. Memory isn't even a concern as we expected, and aside from a slight rub on the fan from the heat sink cover, the Ultra-120 fits perfectly in this orientation with plenty of room on the back side for a second fan. We have installed the optional heat pipe attachment onto the north bridge heat sink for this testing.

Turning the heat sink 90 degrees, we can see that again, aside from some very slight rubbing of the fan on the heat sink, the Ultra-120 sits nicely on the CPU. The right side does interfere with the fan mounting clip and we had to bend a couple fins on the north bridge heat sink, but nothing we would consider an issue. Getting the water cooling installed in this orientation might be a bit interesting due to all the worm clamps used as we will see in our Extreme Overclocking section.

Moving our attention to the video card installation side of things, we can clearly see that HD4850 owners have all the room in the world between slots. There is actually enough room for the top card to get fresh air to the intake. The memory clips do come close to the GPU back side in the top slot but nothing that would require removal of the GPU before being able to remove or install memory. From the front side, we can see that the top PCI slot would be available even with the Supreme FX sound card installed although we don't think anyone would be using the PCI slots for anything but a sound card of their own. We can also see the top PCI-E 1X slot appears to actually be useable as well with a single slot cooler.

Moving to a dual slot card, the HD3870X2, we can see that things get a little bit tighter but are still more than do-able. We know a lot of fortunate souls that are running a pair of HD4870X2s in this board with excellent results. The second photo confirms that even when ASUS makes a 'mistake', it doesn't cause any harm. Earlier we complained about two of the SATA II connectors not being at a 90 degree angle to the board but look at that, with a dual slot card up top and another card below, both connectors are easily accessible. We apologize and take our comment back, 90 degree connectors aren't always required, but still preffered.

Not everything is perfect in the land of the Rampage Extreme installation though. On the left is a back plate that comes with the Rosewill RCX-Z775 CPU cooler and on the right the one that comes with the Thermalright Ultra-120 and numerous other heat sinks/water blocks. Note the difference and what that large Fujitsu capacitor does for this situation. Basically, anything with a closed in back plate is going to be putting pressure on that capacitor as it sits dead center on the back plate. The Rosewill back plate works perfectly because it is cut out, like a couple other coolers that the forums have produced including none other than the ASUS V-60 heat sink's back plate. Perhaps this is something ASUS simply overlooked as their heat sink back plates may all be cut out in the middle. Either way, a solution is only a tin snip or dremel job away. Many have cut out the center portion of the Ultra-120 back plate and continued on with their installation without any issues. For a board of this price, however, we would love to see an ASUS supplied back plate with standard threads included in the package to all but completely remove this issue.

That is about all we came up with during installation of items and as we said, memory never plays a role with the CPU heat sinks so no worries there. Overall, the board is extremely well laid out and even when something isn't ideal, ASUS has made sure not to make it useless.