Thread: ASUS Rampage II Extreme

The Rampage II Extreme is a full ATX form factor motherboard, unlike the Rampage II GENE which is an X58 motherboard with a micro-ATX form factor, also a part of the ROG series. One of the first things that will catch your eye when you look at this board is the inclusion of a full line of tweaking features and backlit buttons located next to the DIMM slots. The power and reset buttons are also among these buttons. Next you will also notice the large passive cooling heatsinks that ASUS has used. One thing missing from this cooling system is the inclusion of water cooling support.

The overclocking buttons that we mentioned earlier have been labeled tweakit. This feature allows you to use the LCD poster device provided with the motherboard and use it to overclock while your OS (Windows) is running. There is also a line of solder points called Probelt where you can measure the voltage of the RAM, CPU, Chipset and PCIe by connecting a multimeter.

We used the following setup to test this board: An Intel Core i7 965 @ 3.2 GHz, 3 GB of Kingston HyperX DDR3 memory and an ASUS GeForce GTX 285 TOP.

The ASUS II Extreme definitely has some great performance and some great features that make it an outstanding product. But these features don't cater to everybody and ASUS has made that pretty clear by adding this to the ROG line. If you are building a high end rig around the Core i7 then this is definitely the board you want, but if you are on a budget, but are still going to go the i7 way, then it would be wiser to opt for something with less features like the ASUS P6T Deluxe or the Intel DX58S0.