Battlefield 3 is installed in its entirety on the Asus Rampage IV Extreme Motherboard. Because this motherboard uses an Intel LGA 2011 socket and the x79 chipset, which supports the Core X i7 extreme and Core i7 CPUs, it is PCIe gen3 ready by default. That only applies to six-core CPUs on this socket. Although four core processors, as well as four-way SLI, crossfire support, and many more features, only two core processors are now available.

I'll go through a few characteristics of motherboard accessories. The LGA 2011 backplate comes first. You might wonder why the LGA 2011 backplate is included in the package. The reason for this is really an X socket feature, which enables the installation of any Elden LGA 2011 native cooler. This will let you use socket technology and install your 1366 cooler on LGA 2011 boards. To chase a champion, we arrived at this point in terms of gamer gear and UI. Consequently, there is a little ROG that seems glossy and silver. On the Battlefield, three games, a three-way SLI bridge, a four-way SLI bridge, a two-way SLI bridge, an outstanding flexible black cable, and lastly a crossfire bridge are accessible. There is also a Pro belt that enables you to open up the board without our IO shield and rapidly check your voltages on various items. With ROG Connect, you may use a second computer and a USB connection to overclock your CPU and adjust settings. The Battlefield lanyard is the next item; it's cool. After plugging a USB cable of some type, we'll get to this. Also included in it is the OSI key. Okay, we have four USB SATA-3, six gigabits per second cables, and lastly, Q connections that make it easier to install a front panel USB connector.

Let's examine the Asus Rampage IV Extreme Motherboard now. The LGA 2011 CPU socket, which supports Core i7 and Core i7 Extreme CPUs, is where we begin. We have eight DIMM slots in addition to the CPU socket.  Asus has included 8 DIMM or RAM slots. I advise using the red slots if you're just adding four RAM modules. Because those are a little bit more away from the CPU socket, you have a little bit more area for large coolers and, speaking of coolers, a little bit more airflow around your socket. We have our VRM coolers here, and Asus has included their latest DIGI+ VRM on this motherboard, meaning you have separate digital voltage regulators for the CPU and RAM, which means more components. It needed to be included in this motherboard. Every square inch of the PCB is visible as being dense. There are some CPU power connections on the PCB board. One eight-pin and one four-pin ATX connection are available. It is not necessary to employ both of them. Although I would recommend if you're going to do any serious overclocking on this motherboard, which I hope you're doing. If you're buying this motherboard, you probably connect both of them. We have an LED post readout on the top right corner of the motherboard. We have slow mode. I would probably leave that off, for the most part, LN2 mode, which is the jumper a little bit down.

We have onboard start and reset switches. We also can turn it on or off. I believe these are all of the PCI Express here, the red PCI Express slots. We have the traditional go button right there. We've got our 24-pin ATX connector, its ideal location along the right-hand edge front USB-3 and what I would consider its perfect location along the right-hand edge Sub Zero sense. It lets you detect the motherboard temperatures even when well below zero. So no matter how cold you are, you know the temperatures you need to know. We have 4 SATA-2 3 gigabit per second and 4 SATA-3 6 gigabit per second ports. There are your front panel connectors, another front USB-3, and one USB to the front panel header. So two of those are running off the Intel chipset, or all four are running off the Intel chipset. We also have an active cooler on the chipset, connected by a heat pipe to another active cooler and our passive heat sink. It's like a chain of heat pipes leading down there and keeping on moving, and this button switches BIOS. Because of the Asus Rampage IV Extreme multi BIOS motherboard. If you corrupt your BIOS, you can change to the other one.

Four-pin PWM connectors are outstanding. I love seeing it; more of those is always better in my mind. So here, let's look at the PCI Express slot layout and ideally laid out for a four-way SLI or four-way crossfire in an 80 SLI semi-ATX form factor. So you will need to do four-way SLI or crossfire. You will need a case like the 800 D from Corsair with maybe seven expansion spots but at least some extra space at the bottom so the bottom part can hang over a little bit. You can install it if you're running two-way SLI or crossfire. You can install those two cards plus an additional three PCIe 16x slots. The PCIe Express slot is split in the PCI slot arrangement. We have a couple of auxiliary power connectors, a 6-pin and a four-pin floppy extra power connector.

Let's move around to the back panel IO of the motherboard before we start to go over some of the features I haven't entirely covered yet. So 7 USB 2.0 ports, a PS2 keyboard mouse combo port, clear CMOS button. We also have a ROG connect button. You use that to do overclocking on another computer connected to this one. There is Bluetooth, which also allows you to do overclocking via your iPad or iPhone. I guess the iPod touch would probably also support it. You can use the app to do that. We've got an eSATA port here, another eSATA port—their gigabit ethernet 4 USB 3.0 7.1 audio out, including optical audio out.

Let's see if there are any features here that I have missed. Some LEDs are built into this motherboard that will remind you about your voltages. So the OC key is just a straight DVI pass-through. Then you have to connect it via USB, whether you do it this way or with the internal style connector. What the OC key does is it overlays your BIOS setting on top of the image that your video card is already outputting. So that means you can see rather than just rely on this right there. You can see status updates about your PC. You can change settings without interfering with whatever you're doing on the screen behind the overlay. It's kind of like if you have a home theater and a receiver with an overlay to change. Whatever settings that at the hardware level, it doesn't affect the media that's playing back in the background. Then you can just shut it off at will, so that is the OSI key. I think that's pretty cool.

The motherboard has 10k black metallic capacitors made by Japan and rated for a hundred and five degrees. Asus figures they'll last up to five times longer than regular solid capacitors. There is also a VGA hot wire. So VGA hot wire is these headers right there in the motherboard. That allows you to overvoltage. You're over voltage your GPUs through the Asus utility rather than connecting variable resistors to the back of the board and adjusting the little dials. The GPU  allows you to adjust those settings using the motherboard. That is very, very cool. What else do we have here for waking? I think that pretty much covers that hope. One more thing is USB BIOS flashback without even a CPU or RAM installed in the system. You throw a USB key in there and rename the file to the correct name. You check to make sure you've got it all set up. You can flash the BIOS in the worst-case scenario: everything went as wrong as it can go, and you can completely restore it to a new BIOS. The battery died. You can see the status of any cards installed in the PCI Express slots in the BIOS. That isn't a new feature on this motherboard. Still, I have seen one on previous Asus new sports like the crosshair five that is very useful for diagnosing video card problems, especially if you have water cooling blocks. I think that pretty much covers it. Thank you for checking out my review of the Asus Rampage IV Extreme Motherboard.

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