Nice board, nice review, hate the colour, i cant stand the Red and Black Rampage theme.

Thanks, Hilbert! I bought one of the last of these boards Newegg had in stock. That is, before you had posted this review. You confirmed that I made the correct choice. BTW, as usual, I love the red and black ROG theme! It reminds me of a bright red, shiny, classic Corvette Stingray. Unfortunately, my i7-5960X is backordered, but I do have it ordered. I've already bought and received a quad pack of Corsair Dominator Platinum DDR4-2800 memory. I haven't a clue what to do with the dozens of unknown memory settings in the ASUS BIOS. It's way, way easier to just set XMP and go from there. If I start with memory that's already OC'd then I can't go wrong.

Thanks, Hilbert! I bought one of the last of these boards Newegg had in stock. That is, before you had posted this review. You confirmed that I made the correct choice. BTW, as usual, I love the red and black ROG theme! It reminds me of a bright red, shiny, classic Corvette Stingray. Unfortunately, my i7-5960X is backordered, but I do have it ordered. I've already bought and received a quad pack of Corsair Dominator Platinum DDR4-2800 memory. I haven't a clue what to do with the dozens of unknown memory settings in the ASUS BIOS. It's way, way easier to just set XMP and go from there. If I start with memory that's already OC'd then I can't go wrong.

Negative Offset overclocking is much better than XMP because you get all the benefits of a massive OC while also undervolting and saving power. Its great and well worth the effort to get it working in Negative offset.

What's the reason for having Gen2 PCI-e slots on this board?

I have a question abou PCIe lanes. Asus states on their site that you can have x16x16, x16x8x8 or x16x8x8x8 configurations. So why can you use 40 PCIe lanes in 4 way SLI and in 3 way only 32 ??? Logically it would be x16x16x8, right?

ASUS buddy, what happened? Almost everything you could ask for in a flag ship board is here. Unfortunately it looks like it was designed by a committee. The M.2 connector is barnacled in but whatever you plug into it could be festooned with red glitter to highlight the board's general tackiness. There is a schizophrenic slum of buttons, switches and LEDs. And a DIP switch! Just a touch of retro? Really? Is that Probelt really useful tucked under the ATX power cable? Not to mention the other cabling headaches - spread out those fan headers! I could overlook all this of course. But why for love of baby Jane is there a crippled PCIe slot on a board like this? What a mess. ASUS, after all the years we've had together. . . why? So meh.