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Asus's Republic Of Gamers (ROG) series motherboards have an unparalleled reputation within the overclocking community and their Rampage II Extreme motherboard is the next step. The Asus Rampage II Extreme is set up as an overclocker’s dream based on Intel's X58 Express and ICH10R chipsets. Featuring a Magenta-ish and white theme, there's an extremely remote chance that you're going to miss this on a retailer's shelf. Opening the outer box reveals two inner boxes; one houses the Asus Rampage II Extreme motherboard itself, while the other contains the accessories. The accessories here are very extensive, including a healthy supply of tidbits that will make your build easier (the Q-connectors and Q-shield are nice treats), 3-way SLI bridge and CrossfireX connector, the LED poster, optional heatsink fan, a rear-lit I/O panel and SupremeFX audio card. Of course there is also a full complement of cables and connectors to round out the package. The Asus Rampage II Extreme comes in an EATX format. The massive black south bridge heat sink dominates everything else and the colour scheme is very sharp looking; the PCB is entirely black, with various components highlighted in red, white, and blue. The overall design of the Asus Rampage II Extreme is excellent and there aren’t any issues noted in previous generation boards such as PCIe cards being shoved up against DIMM slots, capacitors that make access difficult with aftermarket components or SATA ports being rendered unusable by long graphics cards. The Asus Rampage II Extreme features 16-phase power management, more than enough for even the most diehard overclockers, and cooled by attractively coloured heatsinks. At the back of the motherboard there is a PCB heatspreader for the CPU socket area. In the lower left-hand corner of the motherboard, we can see the black PCIe 1x slot for the SupremeFX daughter-board, and below that, three PCIe 16x slots for multiple graphics card setups. According to Asus documentation, when running two graphics cards (blue slots) they will both provide x16 bandwidth, but when running Tri-SLI or three cards in CrossfireX mode the top slot provides 16x bandwidth and the remaining two provide 8x. Additionally, there is one remaining PCIe 1x and PCI slot, but if running a multiple GPU setup these will be lost. Six DDR3 DIMM slots are available which can be populated with 4GB DIMM's for a total of 24GB. We can confirm that the board is capable of running 12GB at 1333MHz with 7-7-7-20-1t timings without a single problem. Getting speeds up to 1600MHz on 12GB is going to depend largely on just how good a particular CPU's memory controller is. The ICH10R Southbridge chip that used in this Intel motherboard supports six SATA 3.0 Gb/s ports. The blue ports are rotated perpendicular to the face of the board in order to aid in better cable management practices and support RAID 0/1/5/10 configurations. There are also two interesting chips here, labeled “iROG”, and these controls the dual BIOSes and the switch-on-the-fly settings. In the backpanel, this Intel mainboard has a single PS/2 port, six USB ports, two Gigabit LAN ports, Firewire and eSATA. There are a small gray button with the reset arrow between the PS/2 and Gigabit LAN port. Pressing this button will reset the CMOS, that this is extremely handy when you are chasing high memory/QPI clocks. Notice that there are no audio ports here as the board includes SupremeFX audio card.
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