Asus ROG motherboards form a category by themselves. There are high standards set for boards that are made with the ROG name attached. The Rampage 2 is seen meeting those standards from the start. The board features and all solid capacitor design and an extensive passive cooling system all around. A closer look at the LGA1366 socket that supports the new Intel Core i7 reveals its surrounding area to be covered by heatsinks popping up all around, cooling the MOSFETs and northbridge. Asus uses ML capacitors and a multi-phase power design to ensure a continuous power demand is met with stability and they call it Extreme Engine.





Three pairs of DDR3 DIMMs make up the triple channel memory set with support for a maximum of 12GB non-ECC un-buffered DDR3 modules. Supported speeds are 1800 MHz (OC), 1600 MHz (OC), 1333 MHz and 1066 MHz. just adjacent to the memory slots is the TweakIT buttons and the ProbeIT connectors. As covered in finer detail in the X48 Rampage Extreme review, TweakIT is a nifty little tool that can be used to make overclocks by adjusting BIOS options without having to restart the PC. ProbeIT uses a set of probes and connectors provided in the package that allows you to monitor voltages around the board.


The southbridge chip has itself covered with a large surface area heatsink that keeps it cool when overclocked. The SB is Intel’s ICH10R which controls the seven SATA ports that are positioned on the right side. The board has a dual BIOS feature which allows you to have a different BIOS version in each, and the unique ability to switch between them. The Rampage II Extreme also supports an SLI or CrossFire setup with up to three cards in tandem. The blue PCI-e slots are x16 until the white slot is used after which it will switch to x16, x8 and x8 speeds. There are also two PCI-e x1 slots, one of which is black for add-on audio cards and the other white. There is also a single standard PCI slot.




The real I/O panel is similar to its older brother’s with a PS/2 Keyboard port, six USB ports, a CMOS reset button, two RJ45 Ethernet ports, and IEEE FireWire port and an e-SATA port. This time again we have no audio connectors on the I/O panel. This is because the package includes an add-on soundcard called SupremeFX which is the same onboard sound chip now placed on an add-on card to make space for other items on the board itself. The soundcard boasts Creative X-Fi technology, but that is actually limited to software only. The 8-channel soundcard uses an ADI AD2000B CODEC and supports EAX 4.0