With all of the news about the Z77 Express motherboards and Ivy Bridge we thought we would step back and take a look at our old friend the X79 and the Sandy Bridge-E CPU. This platform still represents the top end for Intel and although it does not have the same mainstream media acceleration that Ivy Bridge does it is still quite the platform. We are going to dive into the design and features of one of the more prominent enthusiast products for this chipset; Asus Republic of Gamers Rampage IV. We have the Rampage IV Gene and the Formula in the lab and will be running both of these through their paces in the coming days. Right now we are going to walk around the Rampage IV Gene which at $290 is a lot of money to shell out, but it also looks like a lot of motherboard in a small package. Let’s take a look shall we?
Conclusion – Things are looking very good for the Rampage IV Gene. So far the design, component choices and feature set are all looking more than equal to the $290 price point. Now we need to check and see if the performance can match the paper. We will be checking to see if all of these features will continue to work properly when the board is pushed to its limits. Although we know that traditionally Asus ROG Boards have great overclocking potential we have yet to truly test out their X79 ROG line up. We will be getting the Rampage IV Gene on the test bench to find that out in the second half of our review. Discuss this in our Forum
