Asus unveils Rampage II Extreme

Posted at: 4:21pm 20th October 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

Asus reveals the purpose of the new gizmos on its forthcoming X58 board

We’ve already had our first glimpse of Asus’ new Rampage II Extreme when some photos were leaked at the beginning of the month, but Asus has now officially announced the board, and explained the purpose of some of its stranger-looking features.

First off is the row of buttons and connectors on the side of the board, which are there to enable hardware overclocking and testing in real-time. The buttons form a part of Asus’ TweakIt system, which allows you to adjust the parameters such as clock speed and voltage from the controls on the motherboard. Impressively, this can be done on the fly, and even during benchmarks.

Meanwhile, the connectors in front of the buttons are for Asus’ Probelt feature. The connectors are measurement points for connecting a multi-meter, so that you can test certain circuits without having to scan the traces on the PCB.

Next we come to the VTT CPU Power Card; a curious plug-in board next to the chipset heatsink, which is now covered by a Republic of Gamers heatsink. This board features 16 power phases for the CPU, and a further three phases for the QPI (Quick Path Interconnect), plus three phases for the Northbridge, and three more for the memory.

The board is equipped with multi-layer capacitors that Asus says ‘ensure a stable power supply during overvoltage by lowering ESR (Equivalent Series Resistance).’ The idea is that the power supply to the various components will remain stable, even when they’re fully stressed at overclocked speeds.

As well as this, the Rampage II Extreme will also come equipped with a SupremeFX Sound Blaster X-Fi card, and its three PCI-E 2.0 graphics slots will also be compatible with both CrossFireX and 3-way SLI. Meanwhile, six DIMM slots will allow you to install up to 12GB of triple-channel DDR3 memory.

Asus hasn’t officially announced a release date, although a reliable source has told us that the board may well be out in December. This board is unlikely to be cheap, but it offers some interesting new features. Would you be interested in hardware real-time overclocking controls and multi-meter connection points? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.