Alright, you're looking at probably one of the sexiest gaming motherboards. The Asus Rampage II Extreme motherboard is the best option. This thing is absurd, and it has features you have never seen on a motherboard. Well, just looking at it, you can tell it's not for every user and is not for people who have air-cooled systems or slow processors.

There's no such thing as a slower processor cause; this is X58, socket 1366 core, except. I'm going to give you a tour of this absolutely, very highly, and excellent motherboard, and it's ridiculous, and I don't even know what to say about it because it's just silly. It's absurd is the first Republic of Gamers board that has come out with an X58 chipset.

As you know, this supports CrossFire and SLI, so you're not stuck to one manufacturer's video cards. It's got a first of all you're going to notice. I've got to talk about it, cause it's nice. Look at the motherboard PCB from any side, and it's got a thick PCB. The printed circuit board on this thing is wide. It's a 6-layer PCB board, a very dark chocolate brown, it looks black but very brown, and it's 30 by 24 centimeters. So 24 across the top and 30 to the bottom. Again this is socket 1366.

It will support your Core i7 processor, including the 920, then 940, and the 965. So the 4.8 GHz and the 6.4 giga-transfer per second processors, up to 12 gigabytes of triple channel memory.

You are going to see 3 DIMMs for each channel, so you have 6 DIMMs in total, triple channel memory, and it will support the two gig sticks, so up to 12, it will do 1333, 1066 natively, or you can do 1600, 1800 and beyond, with over-clocking and keep mind you want to keep the voltage of your DIMMs, below 1.65. That is the critical number right there. Many people are going way over that, and it's really up to you if you want to do it or not, but make sure you know what you're doing before you jump head. Another thing you'll notice is over here on this site, right here is the Tweak it System, just like on the Rampage Extreme, the original. That's very, very cool.

On the Asus Rampage II Extreme Motherboard, you got your "Reset" and your "Start" buttons, but you also have selectors and a little joystick right of the RAM slot, Which lets you overclock on the fly. It gives you all your settings. The little Post-Its screen gives you all your voltages and frequencies and enables you to adjust them on the fly, which is ridiculous. That's extremely impressive.

I want to show you right down the motherboard; this is your new South Bridge chipset, which is exclusive to X58 and was also on P45 is the ICH10R. It is a die-shrunk ICH9R with a few extra features of hot capability and a couple of other things it gives you. But this thing will support 6 SATA ports rate 0, 1, 0 + 1, 5 just a bunch of disks, and it's pretty much all to you. You also have a floppy and an IDE connector over here, so you will see you have that option. Those are a marvel controller on the other side of the board. It's right of the south bridge chipset and your marvel controller.

Now, you're also going to notice the big deal is that you do have multiple PCI Express 2.0 slots. You have 3 in total; they run PCI Express 2.0 on all 3, and you can run. They're all x16, they will run electrically at x16, x16, x1, or you can do: x16, x8, x8. And you're going to use that for your triple SLI setups, your triple GTX 280's, or any of the future cards that will come out.

That's pretty impressive, and you also have 2 PCI Express x1 slots. This one is above PCI Express 2.0 for your peripherals, and this top one is for the sound card coming with this motherboard. You do not have onboard sound and discreet audio, 7.1 HD. It's a Creative X-Fi supreme card that will come with it. We're going to talk about that in a second, and then, of course, you have that one lonely, PCI bus lest side of the clock battery. He's just sad and alone. It's a PCI 2.2, and no one will use it. Just cause it's going to be an overclocking board on a high-end system, you're not going to putting this in your media center PC, so that's probably going to go unused. But, you know what you could put on there? You could put a rate controller. That would be awesome. Now, let's keep going. Let me talk to you about some of the overclocking features you get on this because it has many overclocking features. First of all, cooling. Obviously, on this motherboard, cooling is ridiculous. All your MOSFETs and VRMs are cooled, and your Northbridge and Southbridge are linked. If you remove all these covers, you've got lots of copper underneath this, which is all linked up together. It's awe-inspiring, and it will keep everything cool.

The ICH10R, since it's die-shrunk, it's going to be more efficient. It's going to run cooler. Nowadays, so you'll have this hot video card, you're not going to get that hard drive controller crashes you used to get back in the day. Those are going to be a long thing of the past. You have the optional fan that comes with it, too, and you have the stack of excellent two systems, so if you look at the back of this thing, you have that big plate back there to increase your CPU cooling on the back. Also, you got all the buttons you wanted; as I said before, power, reset, and clear the CMOS, are right on the back panel. So if you want to clear your CMOS, you have it on the right side of the RAM slots, plus you have all these power and restart buttons right here, which is pretty impressive. Using this and your LCD poster, you have the Tweak it/OC, which lets you overclock on the fly.

Also, if you look at the CPU socket, you got 8 VR ends right up of the CPU socket and another eight right next to it. That's a 16-phase power setup that you have. Which is ridiculous, and it's not only for the CPU. The CPU is not the only one getting multi-phase power; they're spreading the love to everything. Your DRAM, your QPI, and your Northbridge all have 3 phase power, so you will be able to adjust those individually, which is very important. And also, the last thing, and one of my favorite over-clocking features, is the right side of the Power, Reset, and CMOS clear Button. These are little headers. They're two-pin headers, and this is something I've never seen before on a motherboard, and I think this is probably the coolest thing I've ever seen.

Using a little header, you can hook up your multimeter, so if you don't trust your BIOS or any software you're using to monitor your voltages, pretty much. Suppose your voltages for your CPU, your memory, your QPI, DRAM, all these little things here are specific voltages that you can check. And you can check your CPU PLL and your Vcore, Check them all through here, and you get the absolute precise voltage that they are running. If they are running at 1.25, it's going to say 1.25, and that's what you'll get. Your BIOS might say 1.27. You know CPZ might say, you never know who's telling the truth is a way to be 100% completely accurate, so that's a fantastic feature. Finally, an excellent BIOS is the last thing you get as far as overclocking. As you can imagine, this thing has all the features you can want in the BIOS for overclocking; it goes directly into the tweaking section. It doesn't even show you, and you know your boot selection and all that. It just goes straight into overclocking. Your base clock, what some people call the post frequency, the 133, you can adjust that up to like 500 on this card, on this board. It went up to about 225 to 920, which was the maximum. That is a little over 4 Gigahertz, and that was on Air, and it did it with no problem. So it overclocks like a monster, which is meant to overclock like a monster.

All the settings for the Vdims, and your CPU voltages, go to like these ridiculous numbers. Voltages you can adjust, CPU, CPU PLL, QPI, the DRAM, you can do your Encore, North Bridge, Southbridge, and the DRAM bus, which I've never messed with a DRAM bus before. You would pretty much mount your board. So you know this is designed for those people, the bleeding edge people that will be cascade, putting their cascade set up on here, their LN2 setup, or an extreme water cooling loop. What else can I tell you?

This motherboard is heavy. Let me show you the back panel connectors cause those are important right there. Starting off the top of I/O, you got a PS2 for the keyboard, and you can use that once in a while; you got 2 USB 2.0s and two more USB 2.0s. That's a total of 6; you have space inside for four more headers, two more headers which means four more USBs 2.0's, you got dual Gigabit LAN with teaming technology, and you have your Firewire. Your eSATA is also onboard, and that little button is your backlit clear CMOS button which is pretty awesome. You get all those great Asus features, you know, CPU parameter recall, you get Load Line Calibration, that's pretty much like a VJ control, So in case your voltages are dropping as it goes from "Idle" to "Load," it will make sure they stay high, it won't drop them down.

Fan expert and Q connectors, and you know all that stuff. Which is component overheat protection, pretty much a little thermal. I don't know what you call them: temperature probes that you can kind of tape on or glue on to whatever you want inside the motherboard, be a heat pipe on your Northbridge, video card, CPU cooler, anywhere you want to put them. Even your hard drives will monitor the temperature, and you can control that, so when it gets to a specific temperature, you either kick up a fan, turn something off, or turn the whole system off, to protect yourself. Also, as Asus always does, you get a ridiculous amount of stuff in the box. You get a Crossfire bridge in the box; SLI bridges come with video cards. You get a very concise manual. Not that it's comprehensive and has lots of pictures, you don't see photos in manuals very often, but this has all the information you'll need.

These Q connectors will help you hook up your front panel connectors. You get your case and plug them in here first; once you have them all plugged in, you do one big plug into your motherboard. That's convenient and useful, and here's your audio card. That is your SupremeFX 2 and got SPDIF optical, a coaxial, and then an analog for 7.1, all on the back. It lights up a blue on the inside and looks excellent. You also get a fantastic IDE cable which I don't know why you would use. You also get a driver disk, and you will need drivers with all the additional software you could want. It's their EP 6 Engine, which is their energy-saving software. Questionable whether it works or not, but it's there. It's got a bunch of internal over-clocking features as well. Again doubtful if they're valid or not, but the drivers are helpful. The motherboard is insane, so don't fret about that stuff.

Yeah, it also has the drivers for your X Fi card, and 3DMark Vantage is in the box with a license key. You get the optional fan for cooling your MOSFETs and Your VRMs in the back. If you want to throw that on, you also get the little Post screen. Usually, when you turn it on, it will just go through your post sequence. It will show you what step in the Post-it's on, but if you want to, you can use the Tweak It functions and overclock. With the computer running, you can be in the middle of the benchmark, and you're going to get to the CPU section of the benchmark. You lower your CPU overclock to make sure you run stable. Also, you get Molex to SATA connector, so if you have an old power supply and want to connect a couple of SATA hard drives, you can use this. You also get a padded, painted, and backlit input/output shield, an exclusive from Asus, which is very cool, very nicely marked, and all the little white spots there glow. You plug this little cable into the header on your motherboard, which is small and hard to plug in, but once you get it in, it's worth it cause you see everything on the back very clearly.

Please comment below if you have questions or queries about this Asus Rampage II Extreme motherboard.

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