A motherboard tested
Asus ROG Rampage VI Extreme review
We review the exquisite Asus ROG Rampage VI Extreme motherboard, yes, the Rampage is back. A lovely looking motherboard with dark theme offering nice features, design and of course performance. This X299 motherboard can house Kaby Lake-X and Skylake-X processors.
ROG Rampage VI Extreme has been fitted with an incredible advanced RGB LED design that defines its looks, it offers an embedded OLED screen where you can read out processor and board status, it comes with a DIMM.2 M.2 storage solution and, well, it probably is the most advanced and tweakable X299 motherboard that we have tested to date. Not just that, this board has been fitted with not just that Intel Gigabit Ethernet jack, it also has an Aquantia AQC-107 chip embedded, and that means you will be future ready with a full 5 & 10G compatible LAN jack present. It is not different on the WIFI side, the board has been fitted with a Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac+ WiGig 802.11ad solution. At this year and age, it just doesn't get any better than that. A quick note first; there have been a lot of firmware/BIOS updates. This article will reset the CPU tests as X299 and Skylake-X seem to have stabilized. This motherboard is intended for Intel Skylake-X processors that have been released this summer based on Socket LGA2066, however the motherboard also supports Kaby Lake-X procs in the form of the quad-core Core i7 7740K and Core i5 7640K. We test with a 10-core Skylake-X processor (not thanks to Intel). Intel’s primary processor business has been releasing and refreshing quad-core processors for years now with an E type (e.g. Broadwell-E / Haswell-E) processor release every now and then. They had no rush and have been competitive and relaxed all the way for years now. Intel did anticipate Zen or Ryzen, but the AMD consumer-aimed Threadripper 16-core and Naples server segment 32-core made Intel step up its game a notch. Initially, it was expected that Intel would announce a new 10 and maybe 12-core processor based on Skylake-X architecture. With everything that has been going on, there have now been a number of announcements going from top to bottom with an unexpected quad-core Kaby Lake-X release as well as announcements that entail Intel will release 18-core processors.
ASUS has been offering Intel X299 based boards in three motherboard series; Prime, TUF, and ROG. All aesthetically pleasing, all have RGB LEDs that can be combined with ASUS Aura Sync and all get a solid audio solution based on a Realtek S1220A codec. ASUS offers an extended ATX Form Factor sized ATX board with the ROG Rampage VI Extreme, it can support four-way graphics configurations from NVIDIA (2-way) or AMD. ASUS will offer storage including dual M.2 PCIe slots with the help of their DIMM.2 solutions as well as an extra M.2 slot hidden under the chipset heatsink. At a price of €599,- the ROG Rampage VI Extreme is very expensive, but it is the flagship product. Let's start up this review shall we?
