ASUS Rampage IV Extreme - The Board

Moving onto the board, you can see that the overall design is that typical ROG one with the black / red setup going on. The one thing that caught my attention instantly was the active cooling fan over the X79 chip. This is the first time we've seen an active fan on all the motherboards we've seen leaked over the last few weeks. No doubt this is going to help aid overclocking.

Moving in closer to the board, you can see we've got a single PCIe x1 slot and five PCIe x16 slots. As usual, we can't say what the speeds are, but we do get the idea that quad card setups aren't going to be a problem thanks to the dual spacing between each slot. Some boards we've seen while offering four or more PCIe slots, because of the spacing, we know that four dual slot VGA cards wouldn't be an option.

Moving across the bottom of the board, we don't see anything too out of the ordinary with a pair of USB 2.0 headers, front panel connector and a BIOS switch.

Turning the corner, we've got eight SATA ports here. Four SATA III ones and four SATA II ones, the four black ones are all SATA II and run of the Intel X79 chipset, the two red ones closest to the black also run off the Intel X79 chipset but are SATA III. The two SATA III ports on the far left run off the ASMedia ASM1061 controller.

Something that may stand out a little here is on the far right; this is what ASUS has labled as "Subzero Sense". As the name suggests, it's more orientated at people who will be getting into extreme cooling. With the help of two digital thermometers, temperatures of -200c to +200c can be detected. To be honest, though, you'll probably know if you're at 200c without the help of this bad boy.