ASUS Flagship Rampage V Extreme X99 Motherboard Has Five PCIe x16 Slots

With Intel's Haswell-E central processing units about to come out, motherboard makers are finally releasing their latest platforms. The ASUS ROG Rampage V Extreme may not have officially been released yet, but the board has already surfaced on the net.

No doubt ASUS will soon make a press release in which it will formally introduce the newcomer, along with whatever other X99 chipset-based mainboards it has prepared. MSI did just that, so ASUS can't do any less. The X99 chipset is the motherboard logic that Intel created to act as the other half of the Haswell-E line of Core i7-5000 central processing units. It provides the LGA 2011-3 socket, which is incompatible with all other CPUs revealed to date. The ASUS ROG Rampage V Extreme has been leaked by SweClockers and is a really fine piece of work, although not quite as overkill as MSI's best, or the ludicrous ASUS X99-E WS (which has seven PCI Express slots). The ROG Rampage V Extreme has five PCI Express 3.0 x16 slots, allowing it to establish quad-SLI (NVIDIA) or quad-CrossFire (AMD) multi-GPU video card setups, and still have some I/O support left over.

Sure, the black PCI Express slot in the middle will probably be covered up because of how thick most video adapters are, but there's nothing that can be done about that, unless you equip the video cards with thin water blocks. For example, among others in the water-cooling field, EK already has some selling for every adapter likely to ever be installed in systems based on the newcomer. But we digress. Besides the PCI Express x16 slots, the new mainboard from ASUS possesses eight DDR4 memory slots (for 64 GB total, 128 GB in 2015 when 16 GB DIMM modules are created), one SATA Express port (12 Gbps HDDs/SSDs), an M.2 with PCI Express 2.0 x4 physical layer (1.8 GB/s SSD speed), 802.11 ac WLAN with Bluetooth 4.0, Gigabit Ethernet support, and fourteen USB 3.0 ports.

There's even a high-current USB 2.0 connector, allowing you to recharge gaming peripherals and mobile devices. Everything is powered by 24-pin ATX, 8-pin EPS, and 4-pin ATX connectors. Finally, you will find 12 SATA 6.0 Gbps connectors on the motherboard, as well as UEFI BIOS filled with overclocking features. Sadly, the price of the ASUS ROG Rampage V Extreme has not been confirmed, but it is supposed to be of around $460 / €460.

ASUS Rampage V Extreme Motherboard
Images credits to ASUS

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