The Rampage V Extreme is a classic ROG board: its PCB is wide, and it has the familiar black and red design. At £326, it’s also the most expensive board on test. The dramatic colours are matched with big, angular heatsinks too. The tallest is on the left and doubles as a shroud over the I/O, and there’s more metal covering the VRMs above and below the CPU socket.
That chunky, aggressive metal doesn’t impact on PC building though. There’s reasonable room around the CPU socket and the eight memory slots, and it’s easy enough to get to the 8-pin CPU power plug and the 4-pin supplementary connector. That extra connector is the first hint at this board’s enthusiast leanings too. There’s an extra Molex connector for PCI-E power, and there are power, reset and clear-CMOS buttons alongside toggles for PCI-E slots. There’s also a two-character POST display, and an M.2 slot. The latter sits between the right-hand RAM slots and the main power connector, which is unusual but sensible, freeing up more room for slots in the middle.
As Haswell-E can support up to 40 PCI-E lanes, the Rampage allows for four-card graphics setups, with one slot running at 16x and the rest at 8x, although it’s also possible to use two slots at full 16x speed. Asus has installed a single 1x PCI-E slot too, and there’s also a fifth 16x PCI-E slot that’s restricted to 4x, which will be fine for many other expansion cards.
The multitude of features makes for a cramped board, but it’s well laid out, with several connectors installed at right angles and others soldered sensibly around the edges. Asus has installed eight SATA 6Gbps ports, which is a couple less than rivals, but it also has two SATA Express slots – one more than any other board on test. The backplate is well-stocked too. No other board has ten USB 3 connectors, and it also has dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi – another feature not found anywhere else in this test.
Meanwhile, the EFI is slick and easy to navigate, and the Rampage’s base clock can range from 80MHz to 300MHz, which is the broadest gamut of any board in the Labs. That said, the CPU’s maximum voltage of 2V isn’t the highest – both MSI boards offer more electricity; however, to be fair, you’re unlikely to push your vcore beyond 2V anyway.
The Rampage talks the talk – and it has the price to match – but it couldn’t get beyond second or third place in our new application benchmarks, and third in Cinebench too, although the differences are minimal. Its peak power consumption of 238W also matched the MSI X99S SLI Plus as the highest on test. However, with the CPU at its stock speed the Rampage returned a 32fps minimum in Shogun 2 – joint best in this group along with the two MSI boards.
Where the Rampage excels, though, is in overclocking. It was the only board in the Labs to run our CPU stably at 4.3GHz, with every other board topping out at 4.2GHz, although we had to use a 1.3375V vcore to achieve that frequency. This overclock saw the Rampage top the table in our image editing and Cinebench tests, but it stayed at second or third place in the rest of our application tests. However, the extra voltage did mean that power consumption sky-rocketed – when overclocked and loaded with Prime95, the 493W total system power draw was 58W higher than the nearest rival.
This board isn’t frugal, subtle or cheap, but it goes some way to justifying its high price for enthusiasts. It has a broad feature set, with enthusiast features, plenty of ports and connectors and 802.11ax Wi-Fi, and its overclocking prowess is obvious – no other board in this Labs could hit 4.3GHz with our i7-5960X. It isn’t cheap, but it’s worth the extra cost if you can afford it. MIKE JENNINGS
VERDICT
The Rampage is expensive, but it justifies its cost with bucketloads of features and enviable overclocking abilities.
SPECIFICATIONS
Chipset Intel X99
CPU socket Intel LGA2011-v3
Memory support 8 slots: max 64GB DDR4 (up to 3,300MHz overclocked)
Expansion slots Five 16x PCI-E 3, one 1x PCI-E 3
Sound Asus ROG SupremeFX 8-channel
Networking 1 x Intel Gigabit LAN
Overclocking Base clock 80–300MHz, CPU Multiplier 12-80x; max voltages, CPU 2.1V, RAM 1.9V
Ports 10 x SATA 6Gbps (X99), 1 x M.2, 2 x SATA Express, 10 x USB 3, 2 x USB 2, 1 x LAN, 1 x PS/2, 3 x audio out, line-in, mic, 1 x PS/2, 1 x optical S/PDIF
Dimensions (mm) 305 x 272