Showcase
The original Rampage IV Extreme has been Asus’ best-selling X79 board, and despite the steep asking price (Rs.28, 000 now, Rs.35k+ initially), it was immensely popular amongst enthusiasts and gamers alike. With the Black Edition, Asus have tried to offer something extra, even on top of the already gargantuan feature set for the original flagship. If someone remembers the Rampage III Black Edition, it was the added ThunderBolt module which added Xonar grade sound and dedicated Killer NIC in an add-on PCI-E card. For the newest member of the family, it comes in two folds – the integrated SupremeFX sound module, and their OC Panel, which we’ve already seen debuting with the Maximus VI Extreme. We will come to these areas later, but for now, let’s look at the board in whole.
The Rampage IV Black Edition, or RIVBE as many enthusiasts call it, follows the same Extended ATX form factor as the original Rampage IV Extreme. The layout is pretty same, but Asus has thrown in plenty little things into the mix. Though it is a ROG branded board, the red and black liveries are replaced with predominantly black, and tints of ash (like in the DRAM slots) to maintain the ‘Black Edition’ theme. We will see later on that this trend continues in the UEFI/BIOS as well, amongst other things. Visually, the heatsink(s) have changed too from the original Rampage IV Extreme. The power delivery now has a smaller heatsink which is connected to a beefier one which also acts as a shroud to hide the silver IO connectors. That’s a neat trick, and Asus also employs a slick engraved ‘Rampage IV Black Edition’ on top of it to make it more aesthetically appealing.On the RIVBE, the chipset heatsink is detached/standalone, and the design philosophy follows that of their Z87 boards rather than RIVE, which had a connected heatsink and active cooling in the form of a chipset fan.The socket area features Asus’ modified X79 socket plate – you will notice that the metal extension to the socket holes in other X79 products is not here – one would imagine this is due to the styling, but also the back plate changes such that 775 coolers with 2011 socket extensions can be used easier (such as the X-Socket arrangement with the RIVE).
As with all Asus motherboards, the DRAM sockets continue to have single-sided latches, which make it easier to remove the memory sticks with large GPUs installed, but also introduces the need to push the sticks fully into the latches to ensure a firm connection is made. There are eight fan headers in total in RIVBE, two (CPU 4-in, CPU_OPT 4pin) on top of the motherboard, another 4-pin just below the debug LEDs, two more near the 24-pin ATX power connector, and two on the bottom of the board, with the eighth one to the bottom left of the DRAM slots near the IO. That gives an end user plenty of options to hook up fans with the motherboard which can then be monitored using Asus’ bundled utilities.
A two digit display is on the right hand top corner of the motherboard, alongside some other OC oriented componentry. That area looks particularly busy with LN2 mode jumper, slow mode switch and voltage read points, along with PCIe enable/disable switches and MemOK! Button (for booting with safe memory settings). Further down, we have the standard ATX 24-pin power connector and the USB 3.0 header (ASMedia controller) in their normal places.
The bottom of the board also gets the same ‘busy’ treatment, but here the things different from the RIVE are the inclusions of a ROG_EXT header (for the OC panel),a four-pin Molex power connector for VGA, and a Trusted Platform Module header.Rest of the stuff (two removable BIOS chips, rear IO, front panel header points, two USB 2.0 headers, two 4-pin fan headers, DirectKey and BIOS_Switch buttons) are pretty much standard fare.
The board supports all the possible GPU setups (SLI/CrossFireX), with x16/x16 for dual GPUs, x16/x8/x16 for triple, and x16/x8/x8/x8 for quad GPUs. There are no PLX chips like some of the other high end boards have employed (Asrock’s X79 Extreme11, for example, has TWO), so the lanes are fed by the CPU itself rather than offloaded to another chip. Two PCIe 2.0 x1 slots are also present, should any user require add-in cards.
Barring the I/O connectors, the left hand side of the motherboard is predominantly given to audio, and Asus employs their SupremeFX Black audio solution in the RIVBE. This is something new, since previously the Extreme boards never had premium audio (highest end board to have them was the Formula) but guess Asus went full circle to provide all high end features in a single board. As with the implementations, the audio section has a separate PCB and the separation has a series of LEDs underneath which light up once the board is powered on.
The rear I/O has the top covered by the RIVBE heatsink cover (the one with engravings), and from left to right we have the PS/2 port, four USB 2.0 ports, an ROG Connect Button, a USB BIOS Flashback button, six USB 3.0 ports (from ASMedia controllers/hubs), two eSATA ports (ASMedia), an Intel Gigabit Ethernet port, the 802.11ac dual band 2T/2R module with BT4.0 and audio jacks.
SupremeFX Black Audio and OC Panel
The Audio Circuitry centers around a Cirrus Logic® CS4398 DAC: 120 dB SNR, -107 dB THD+N (Max. 192 kHz/ 24 -bit), a TI 6120A2 high fidelity headphone amplifier (80 mW into 600 ohm from a ±12-V Supply at 0.00014% THD + N), high quality filter capacitors in both directions (ELNA® premium audio capacitors, WIMA® film capacitors), and NEC TOKIN UC2 audio relay, all within an EMI shield and housed within a separate PCB. The audio codec used here is REALTEK ALC1150.
Asus has quite a busy PCB going on for the RIVBE, but smartly, they have also taken quite a few of them out of the physical board itself and put them in a separate solution which they call the OC Panel. First introduced with the Z87 flagship Maximus VI Extreme, the OC Panel PCB basically has the Slow Mode/LN2 mode/Subzero Sense/VGA Hotwire operators, a couple of fan headers (Needs the SATA power connection to be plugged in to feed them), and the package is neatly topped with a LCD display with a couple of buttons to change BCLK/Multiplier settings on the fly without getting into the BIOS/UEFI. The LCD also displays the current values of the BCLK/Multiplier, along with CPU temperature, and fan speed(s), depending upon the settings. OC Panel uses its own proprietary connector onboard to get information from the system, hence only a couple of select motherboards (All Maximus VI models, RIVBE) are supported at this point of time but something tells me that we will see it implemented in more systems in the future. Asus also supplies a neat single 3.5” bay adaptor for the OC Panel to integrate it inside the computer case should anyone doesn’t want to use it standalone (though I should say that unless you’re using an open test bench, the connector cable might be a little short for a tabletop use).
