Quote Originally Posted by CD82 View Post
Is the ASUS Rampage IV Extreme a nice board to get???
I can wait cause I have this system here... im looking at other options also
I know nothing about any other X79 board except for the one EVGA X79 Dark which I already own. My assumption would be that because Asus has a good reputation in the motherboard market and has always marketed their Rampage/ROG series boards as high-end, that the Rampage IV would be a good board (it would be my choice if the Black Edition didn't exist).

But like I said before, you can overclock on any X79 motherboard if that's what you're looking to do and you don't need a $400 motherboard to do it. High-end boards that cost $400 and up are boards that are going to have higher quality components to handle the increased voltage that the CPU needs, added voltage phases, higher quality on-board sound, bigger/better heatsinks, possibly a better UEFI BIOS with a ton of settings that no one will ever use, and so on; but they're for the purpose being able to fine tune your settings and really squeeze the absolute most performance out of your machine. These are boards that are used to set and break world records.

Honestly, at this point I feel like I'm trying to talk you out of buying the high-end board, but I'm really just trying to save you some money which can go toward other components (assuming you're on a budget). It's just out of the ordinary that you would want to buy the most expensive hardware to start overclocking when you had never overclocked in the past. If you do end up burning something up you're either going to be out a lot of money or you're going to be waiting quite some time for a replacement motherboard if you end up buying one that's back-ordered at the moment.

A lot of high-end motherboards will also let you tweak settings beyond what is considered safe because those who are trying to break records are running LN2 to keep their components at extreme temperatures.

The only reason I'm getting the RIVBE is because:

  • It has a perfect PCIe connector layout that fits my needs (although the RIVE has a very similar layout)
  • I'll be able to use 3-way SLI and still have an open PCIe 8x slot for any expansion card I want to throw in there (like this PCIe SSD that I'm currently eye-balling)
  • Two extra SATA6 ports (although they may end up being crappy like most SATA ports that aren't native)
  • I've decided that I won't be upgrading to an 8-core Haswell-E in H2 2014 (unless something I'm doing absolutely warrants it), so I might as well make my current 6-core machine awesome
  • I got it for $70 less than what Newegg wanted to charge me
  • I'm a complete sucker for aesthetics
  • I'm an idiot who spends too much money on his computer


I'm just trying to lay it all out there because if you find that you don't want to overlock, well, you've just spent a lot of money on stock hardware when you could have saved some of it and put it toward a better video card like a GTX 780Ti or a the newest mystery GPU that nVidia has yet to reveal (as opposed to the GTX 770).