X58A-UD9 vs. Rampage III Extreme, powered by i7 980X - whose crown?

Let’s start to carve it right away as we won’t cover it in this article! We will be free to omit from the description of motherboards everything that has been mentioned several times in several articles. The reason for this is prosaicly simple. On the one hand, there would be such a long description that no one would read through, and on the other hand, there are so many other interesting things on the pages that they are also plenty enough to make an interesting article. We will follow this principle not only on the ASUS page, but also on the Gigabyte page, so if anyone finds names for the page that are not explained, we ask that you look through the motherboard articles here: http://www.hoc.hu/index.php?p=articles&fk=2 Let's see first what came from ASUS!

ASUS Rampage Extreme is not an unprecedented board, our copy is the third generation. A common feature of these sheets is that their manufacturer targets the top category with them, recommending their product specifically to tuners. We’ve already found some real specialties in previous generations, but this current page wants to add even more. By the way, Rampage is a member of the ROG series, and the abbreviation, as you may have read several times with us, is an abbreviation of the words Republic of Gamers.

The packaging is the usual size box, there is no change in the colors. The lid is velcro so we can open it to see what we are buying. Opening the box, you will find the motherboard on the top shelf, below which you will find the box that hides the accessories. In addition to a lot of cables, we also find a small rib that can cool the chipset, and it also has a tiny fan on it. The next thing that catches our eye is a tiny module that we can connect to the motherboard. It reads Bluetooth, so there can be no doubt that one of the new features, an element of ROG Connect, is in our hands. We will discuss the nature of this! Let's see the page now!

The motherboard is one of the larger ones, but the opponent, smaller than the Gigabyte's card, is "just" a normal ATX format. Iron also follows ASUS traditions in its colors. The two predominant colors are black and burgundy (red).

Regarding the PCI Express connectors on the motherboard, it is important to say that although there are four full-length busses that look like x16, the board only supports three-way SLI and CrossFireX. This is because there is no additional nF200 chip on the board that could increase the number of PCI Express channels offered by the chipset, and Intel's chipset is just enough for that. According to our information, an additional card with two nF200s will be available later, thus opening the way for four-way systems.

Looking at the cooling, we can see that no savings were made at ASUS. We can feel the large-scale ceramic-based solutions we suspect have already seen at ASUS.

As I mentioned, on the page we will find some opportunities that the hard core of tuning will take advantage of. Such is the case with the redesigned measuring points, for which you can also find a cable in the box of the motherboard. We will really see the advantage of the cable if the motherboard is already built into a housing and we do not have access to the measuring points with the multimeter.

Another interesting feature is the four switches found next to the memory rails. These can be used to turn the PCI Express busbars on and off. The significance of this is that during tuning, you may only use one or two video cards, so you can turn off unused interfaces in one go, increasing the stability of the motherboard.

Here is another novelty of the ROG Connect mentioned above. This is a solution whose usefulness is divided. The point is that you can even configure the motherboard settings with a mobile phone (PDA smartphone) via a Bluetooth port, at least if the appropriate software is available on your mobile phone. Some say serious tuning doesn't use one, but others say the card will be bought not only by blood professionals, but also by hobby tuning with a thicker wallet, and for them, such tuning is a tempting option, and you can also flash it in front of your buddies.

There are more and more surface-mounted LEDs on the motherboard. So far, this has not been unusual for more expensive ASUS cards, but the number of these little lights is constantly growing, so the light signals also provide more and more information about how the card works. You can see if the PCI Express bus is working, but also if data is being exchanged on the SATA interfaces.

As I indicated at the beginning of this page, I won’t cover much of the page, so I definitely recommend the articles referenced at the beginning of this page.

Let's have the dry data now!