Asus Interview at IDF13, Rampage IV Extreme – Black X79 Motherboard Revealed

by Marco Chiappetta — Thursday, September 12, 2013, 07:15 AM EDT

Asus, Corsair, and Intel held a joint event in the Four Seasons hotel yesterday, near the Moscone Center in San Francisco where IDF13 is currently taking place. During the event, the three companies outlined the many advances they’ve all made over the last few years and some well-known overclockers took products from each company—namely the Intel Core i7-4960X, some Corsair memory, and an Asus X79-based motherboard—and overclocked them using liquid nitrogen, in an attempt to break a number of world performance records.

We didn’t stick around long enough to see just how far the overlcockers were able to take the rigs, but at one point did see a Core i7-4960X running at about 5.7GHz at a core voltage of 1.7v, with all cores active. That’s one heck of a big bump for a CPU packing almost 2B transistors.

Just before the event, we also had a chance to sit down with Asus’ Jackie Jsu, who heads up the company’s components group. We asked Jackie a number of questions regarding the health of the PC enthusiast community, Asus’ commitment to enthusiasts and the DIY crowd, and asked for some insight into the future and where Asus see’s the PC moving forward. Some of Jackie’s answers may surprise you.

We couldn’t dig out much information on future products, but Jackie did seem bullish on the PC’s prospects and he revealed that Asus actually saw some growth in their high-end motherboard segment, which includes products in the Republic of Gamers (RoG) and TUF families. Check out the interview above for all of the juicy details.

Just after out interview, during the OC event, Jackie also unveiled Asus’ latest flagship X79 Express-based motherboard, the Rampage IV Extreme - Black. According to Jackie, Asus put in 5x the typical amount of engineering effort to ensure this motherboard had the most optimized trace layout and UEFI for maximum stability and overclockability of Ivy Bridge E. The memory traces in particular were re-engineered five times to find the optimal layout.

More information on the Asus Rampage IV Extreme – Black is available here. And we’ve got some images in the gallery below as well. Enjoy.

Tags: Intel, Asus, Corsair, Overclocking, black, idf13, rampage iv extreme

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com