Extreme AMD and baby Rampage III

I was happy to see the new Rampage III Gene present. I've been using the Rampage II Gene for a while now in my daily rig and I am still impressed with its daily performance for its compact mATX size.

The 2010 version, baptised as nr III (quite logical name :p) with no big changes as to be expected. The specs are extended with SATA 3.0 and USB3.0 now. The board follows the new colour scheme and heatsink design of the Crosshair and Rampage Extreme III series.



You can clearly spot the ROG Connect USB and the USB 3.0 connectors



The new IOH heatsink design seems a bit beefier than the older Gene board. Ons of it's few flaws.



Readout points near the power connector, spot also the new LED poster on this little Gene III.

Crosshair IV Extreme

We already saw this model in an early form at the CeBIT. Milan at that time was a bit mysterious about the details and specs and it is shown now why. There was no word from Asus back then regarding creating a board with the Lucid Hydra chip. The Extreme board was going to be just a souped up version of the Formula IV, with some extra gimmicks to please the enthusiast crowd.

This was the shot of the CeBIT board



This is the layout we got presented last Friday :



Not that many differences to spot, just the Lucid Hydra chip is clear now. One extra PCI-E slot, some parts moved position.

The Lucid Hudra seems to have come along way, early numbers we saw at CeBIT were not that impressive. For those that are not aware what the Hydra chips does or can do: It enables the user to mix different brands ( read ATI from 4xxx series and Nvidia cards from 9 series range on ) and still configure some sort of Crossfire/SLI Hybrid between the card, in theory giving a healty boost in performance. What it also does is enable SLI on an AMD platform without the need of a hacked driver.



A close up on the little chip that does it all. Hopefully the chip drivers have evolved so that the performance is there. Question unanswered was are there gonan be two versions of this board, one with and one without Lucid ? Only time will tell...

Some more technical slides, virtually anything is possible now with Hydra...





Asus explained also a little bit more on their own implementation of the AMD Turbo technology. Without any words here are some screens on the subject.





Good thing is that this Asus technology is also available for non Hexacore CPU's. Performance check on that matter in the upcoming Crosshair IV article

ROG Expander

Finally we got the ROG Expander in our hands for the first time. Early pictures were leaked a few weeks ago and the Nordics have been benching on the board last week with pretty good results. Linkie here : ASus ROG Expander board benched !!

It was at first called ROG Dude, or Dud in this case as this was a non working press sample :) Asus explained us that the NFcorce 200 chipset was not a MUST for their X58 flagship the Rampage Extreme III. Albeit the NF200 causes a minor performance drop compared to non equipped boards and adds a hefty price tag. So they preferred it to be an option as it would only be a solution for benchers only. Sadly it will remain a benchers only board as it will be difficult to be used inside a case. Question about a Future REX II with NF200 onboard was left unanswered...

Here are some extracts of the presentation:





You tube video of the ROG Dude:



We talked to Mister Wu about using this expander on other brands and or other Asus boards. Theoretical it should be possible but probably a chip on the expander board requires an Asus product to work... If ever we get a sample of this Asus 4 way SLI enabler we will try to find it out for you...



For the VGA's not much new to report. The ARES card will go into production with some slight modifications, still no word on limited availability like with the MARS cards. It all depends on demand and the availability of the GPU chips.


5870 Matrix card was present too

That was all folks

It was really nice to meet the Mister Wu and Sabine (marketing rep). And to discuss tech and OC stuff this time. Not having to listen to the same old, sometimes slightly boring, stuff. Very good initiative to get feedback and to report last minute issues straight to the big shots. I hope we can do these meetings on a regular basis.

A big thanks to Milan and Rogier for having us. We can be a bit of a pain in the ... sometimes, with all our demands. Madshrimps usually approaches hardware slightly different then most other review sites. Luckily for us Peter was there to break the ice and to mingle straight with the Asus boys.



Massman and Roger (Oldscarface) trying to revolutionise the Asus motherboards by trying to persuade mister Wu

Hopefully we can get some of that new stuff soon in the lab for some testing :) Very nice to see one of the top Dutch overclockers too ( sorry Peter talking about Roger) and all the others guys from the Dutch/Belgian Media.