Asus Rampage IV Black Edition Motherboard Unveiled

Asus took the 2013 edition of the IDF to announce a new high-end motherboard, the Rampage IV Black Edition. This time, it is a real product and not a concept, showing the Black version of the Rampage IV Extreme.

Built around the Intel X79 chipset, this high-end motherboard adopts a LGA-2011 socket and of course accommodates the Core i7 Extreme, the last Ivy Bridge Extreme. If the board contains broadly the design of the Rampage IV Extreme, it now improves on several issues including the level of PCB traces. Asus engineers say they remade 5 times the design of the PCB to find the optimal layout of the memory banks.

With four PCI-Express full-size, this board has two PCI-Express 1x slots. The cooling system was of course worked and owners of Rampage IV Extreme appreciate the disappearance of the fan on the chipset heatsink. With a dozen ports of Serial ATA 6 Gb/s, the board has a SupremeFX audio circuit with a signal/noise ratio of 120dB. There are 8 USB 3.0 ports as well as eSATA ports and a Wi-Fi i802.11ac module. For now Asus does not give much more technical details, except that the board enjoys a generation of UEFI BIOS 2013.

Jackie Hsu, Vice President of Asus, evokes a retail price of $499 for this motherboard.