ASUS ROG Rampage VI Extreme Motherboard – first look!

At Insomnia i61, up at the Birmingham NEC, KitGuru had a special meeting planned with Kris Huang, Senior Director for the ASUS Mainboard Division. Under guard, he had the latest ROG Rampage VI Extreme mainboard and he was keen for KitGuru to get a first look. With the Street price likely to be well north of £500 we were keen to get open the box and dive into the cool tech inside.

For gamers, overclockers and content creation professionals, Rampage boards are always a little special and this Extreme Edition promises to live up to that reputation.

The sexiness starts with the 10Gbit LAN connector. We all know that 2017 will go down as the last year when 1Gbit was considered ‘OK’, with a plethora of 2.5Gbit and 5Gbit boards set to hit the more affordable sector of the market. Router companies are in the process of stepping up and network transmission speeds are set for an almighty boost. When the European Hardware Association surveyed near 15,000 technology enthusiasts across the continent, more than 80% confirm that their primary rig was connected via wire. Built-in 10Gbit is very good news indeed.

Support for memory up to 4,200MHz is available as standard, while the more interesting slot is the DIMM.2 that Kris was particularly keen to point out. Using a special, double-sided connector, you can connect a pair of M.2 drives using the fastest connection speed available to date. It bypasses the DMI bottleneck (Direct Media Interface) and lets your data really fly.

For overclockers, there is a water cooling header on the board and plenty of connectivity on the rear panel – including USB Type C.

Lastly, there is the shroud. At first glance, it appears to be metal, but Kris has assured us that he had multiple engineers working on the material and electronics – with the result that the material becomes translucent when the mainboard is powered. Materials that change opacity in use? How cool is that!

We asked Kris for an exclusive walk-through on camera and he was happy to oblige. Apologies for the sound and image quality, this was dropped on us last minute and we had none of our high end camera gear with us!

KitGuru Says: With all its packaging, Kris estimates that this motherboard tips the scales near 3Kg. It looks serious, has a serious spec and weighs a serious amount. We seriously can't wait to get it into the KitGuru Lab for detailed analysis. From Hollywood colour-grading systems to extreme overclockers, this board is likely to win fans no matter what its launch price.

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