Sweclockers published some photos of the new Rampage V Extreme motherboard for the forthcoming X99 CPUs. We have shameless reprinted them here and featured them because it looks like as usual ROG have delivered the goods yet again. The style is very similar to the R4E which was really the high end board of choice for 90% of the life of X79 but they’ve taken all the lessons from their other ROG boards and a few others to create what looks a masterpiece in red and black:
Some things stand out here – holy moly that’s a lot of Sata! There are 8 Sata 3 (aka 6GBPS) ports on top of two Sata Express ports – these two combined make up the huge red block on the bottom right edge. There is also an M.2 slot tucked in between the DIMM slots and the 24 pin power connector. So yeah holy future proofing batman!
We also note that there is the external “OC Panel” overclocking device yet again that almost no one uses. Finally ROG got rid of the white levers on the PCI slots and DDR slots. Of course the memory is now DDR4 too, your old DDR3 will no longer be compatible which means lots of money for kits that will quickly become the cheap stuff.
The southbridge heatsink is detached from the northbridge – this is nicer for those who may want to watercool their VRMs. The VRM cooler is not a hybrid air/water cooler meaning it will be a better air cooler. If we see one of those it’ll probably be on the formula board. Of course we now get an IO cover – this first appeared for ROG on the R4E black edition – the idea being shamelessly stolen from the X79 Dark – correction I’ve been informed that the x79 sabertooth had it first. I must have blocked out the sabertooth board from my memory because that was an ugly ugly board. The other nice touch is the built in LED lighting for the audio section of the PCB, this always look cool.
Even though the south bridge block is large it doesn’t appear to include a PLX chip for lane splitting. The other good news is that it doesn’t have that annoying little fan that the R4E had. The slots appear to be marked at x16 or x8 just like the R4E was. The socket is however different from most of the other boards we’ve seen – we assume this is to make the life of a bencher easier in terms of insulation and indeeed there is a good amount of clear PCB around the socket.
For the IO we see a whole ton of USB 3 – only 2 USB 2 now and by the look of things no esata either. I’m not sure why 10 USB3 is necessary or why eSata was cut. The 3 RF connectors also imply wifi will be included as it was on the R4E BE, however the BE and all other recent Asus boards with wifi used two connectors and this has three. Presumably this is the same technology then used in the high speed router which means we could see the 1.3GBPS connection through the wifi, finally beating the old 1GBPS on the solitary wired LAN port. Of course bandwidth, lag and reliability are two different things and I’d take a reliable 1GBPS over a 99% uptime 1.3GBPS connection.
Other expectations include bluetooth 4, as this was already present on earlier motherboards even though we don’t see the usual blue antenna on the IO and thunderbolt which does not appear to be on the IO plate. Usual SupremeFX audio will be there and it’s good to see that the PS/2 connector is still there. My only gripe is that the PCIe extra power connector appears to have reverted to a molex vs the 6 pin GPU connector we had on the R4E – boo to that! I’m expecting the price to be around $500 i.e. similar to the R4EBE as this has all the same functionality, more so than the R4E which ran at $450. The swedish listed price is ~$575 but that does include 25% tax putting the untaxed price at $460. Launch date is expected to be the same as Haswell-E i.e. Aug 29th.
Of course the real question is how long do we wait for the black edition?
