ASUS X99 Rampage V Extreme Review - Introduction

The ASUS Rampage V Extreme  - Isn't it just yummy?

In this review we check out the ASUS Rampage V Extreme motherboard, armed with the X99 chipset and with that luxurious OC panel this motherboard is amongst the most high-end X99 motherboards available on the globe. It's big, fast, ROG themed and has luxurious features and overclocking written all over it. The Rampage V ROG Edition is an E-ATX form factor motherboard for the new Haswell-E series of processors. The motherboard comes with a massive feature set like SLI/Crossfire support, AC WIFI, heaps of SATA3 connectors, overclock features, a nice audio solution, M.2 PCIe compatibility and yeah, the means to overclock. 

The Intel Core i7-5960X and other Haswell-E chips are released into the market in September 2014 and based on a new socket LGA2011-V3 infrastructure and DDR4 quad channel memory. The new Haswell-E series being released features three models, two 6 core and one 8 core processor intended for the most high-end desktops anno 2014. For Intel it is the first 8 core desktop CPU for consumers. However, Intel has been offering 8 and even 12 core processors in their Xeon server line for quite some time now to the business channel.

With the new Haswell-E processor comes a new chipset and slightly revised processor socket. Intel still uses Socket 2011, but its a revision 3 socket meaning the older Socket 2011 will not work on the new X99 chipset motherboards. That of course goes both ways, you cannot use Haswell-E on say an X79 motherboard. Interesting is a first introduction of DDR4 memory. The new memory allows for lower voltage memory modules, this memory defaults to 2133 MHz at 1.2 Volts. However the memory controller is quad-channel compatible. As a result, with overclocked memory at roughly 3 GHz, you can reach 70, maybe 80 GB/sec on your memory bandwidth, which is an insane number. In this article we'll have a chat about a X99 motherboard in terms of the chipset and then we'll throw a decent photo-shoot and a benchmark suite at the products and get an indication of what performance is like with the Intel Core i7-5960X and X99 Platform.

With the ROG based Rampage V Extreme ASUS once again tried to raise the bar with features and overclocking potential. The board comes with the nice external OC panel, and the most exquisite LN2 options as well. Don't worry though if you are not a pro-overclocker, as for the enthusiast end-user there is plenty of other stuff that makes this board yummy! You will receive the cool ROG design motherboard with 3x3 802.11 a/b/g/n/AC Wireless LAN, M.2. PCIe SSD compatibility and SATA Express. ASUS markets this motherboard with 5-Way Optimization as it combines TPU, EPU, DIGI+ Power Control and Fan App functions to push the system Xpert 3 and Turbo Apps. ASUS takes overclocking even a step further as they have an LGA2011 OC socket. The Haswell-E CPUs actually have a few more pins that are not used. ASUS designed a socket allowing them to use these pins and that way they can add a little more voltage to the CPU and DDR4 memory allowing higher voltages with LN2 based overclocking. An improved audio section will get you quality sound, and then there's some extra bling to be found with nice subtle red LEDs making this board shine like a halo. The board comes with five PCIe gen 3.0 slots which we'll talk about in more detail over the next pages. Goodness, this is just the introduction page... so join us for another X99 motherboard review, a product that is bound to tease and please.