The Board - Layout

The ASUS RAMPAGE IV BLACK EDITION is nearly completely dressed in black, with a few hints of the red ROG color here and there. There is no mistaking this board – it is an ASUS product, although doubts might arise after you turn the board around and take a look at its back, since there is some weird stuff going on here, but more on that in a moment.


The area around the socket is pretty open considering the CPUs it supports, and the low-profile heatsink is optimized to offer the clearance most aftermarket cooling solutions need. The rear of the socket has a huge backplate in place, but it can be removed and replaced with the smaller backplate ASUS included in its accessories box. The socket design of Intel's SKT 2011 CPUs comes with mounting points built into the front of the board, which makes using aftermarket backplates much less of an issue with the platform. You actually don't need one at all, but the smaller backplate ASUS included will also take care any issues you might run into due to the CPU cooler's design.


There are six expansion slots on the ASUS RAMPAGE IV BLACK EDITION, all of which are PCIe-based. Four of them are full PCIe x16 slots and two are PCIE x1 slots, but the PCIe x1 slots can also take fully sized PCIe x16 cards if you plan to install as many VGAs as possible for some distributed coin mining. The DIMM slots each support DIMMs of up to 8 GB in size, which brings total memory support to 64 GB, and feature a highly optimized trace layout for better performance and higher, more efficient overclocks. ASUS mentioned that a considerable amount of time has been spent on that trace layout to get the most out of Intel's SKT2011 memory controllers, but you need to keep in mind that it takes some seriously expensive memory to make the most of that. Thanks to Corsair and others, I do have some highly clocked memory, so I was pretty eager to put those claims to the test, and I can tell you that I was not disappointed.


Inlcuding the usual USB and audio headers, the bottom of the motherboard also has more switches, fan headers, and buttons than any other motherboard I have recently seen. The eight fan headers ASUS placed in various locations on the ASUS RAMPAGE IV BLACK EDITION are also all 4-pin PWM-based.


The rear I/O panel has Clear_CMOS and ROG_Connect buttons at the top, below a PS/2 keyboard/mouse combo and two USB 2.0 ports. There are also two other USB 2.0 ports and six USB 3.0 ports, LAN, Wi-Fi, optical audio, and analog ports here, and two eSATA 6 Gb/s ports and a total of ten internal SATA ports on the opposite side of the motherboard. Four of the six gray SATA 6 Gb/s ports are driven by onboard ASMedia controllers, while the other two are provided by for by Intel's X79 Express chipset that also drives the four black SATA 3 Gb/s ports. Although some are going to lament Intel's lack of full SATA 6 Gb/s support here, the fact that Intel's X79 Express chipset works that way isn't anything new. Having used a 3960X and ASUS's P9X79 Deluxe in my personal rig for many many months, I never really found those four slower ports impractical. Mechanical drives are still the only truly affordable solution if you want a lot of storage capacity, and mechanical drives definitely do not saturate SATA 3 Gb/s ports. The other Intel X79 Express ports should meet your needs if RAID functionality is what you are after, and you will probably use a discrete RAID card if not.