ASUS Rampage IV Black Edition Review

ASUS Rampage IV Black Edition Conclusion

High end products position themselves in a precarious place – they have to live up to their price point, but also not price themselves out of the market.  When dealing with the X79 platform, where the six core processors cost $560-$999, price can still be an issue.  The Rampage IV Black Edition is more expensive than the Rampage IV Extreme – moving from a $450 to a $500 price point.  That equates the motherboard to almost the same price as the i7-4930K processor: this regime is not unheard of in the mainstream Z87 platform, where motherboards can easily out-price the i7-4770K.  So when a user makes the jump to X79, it might not only be the expense of the CPU to be taken into account – ASUS has done well in making the RIVE one of the bestselling motherboards of X79.

Aside from the color scheme, the Rampage IV Black Edition brings some of the Z87 platform enhancements that ASUS has been working on to the antiquated X79 ecosystem.  Some of the ones that get the most attention is the SSD Secure Erase feature in the BIOS and the updated BIOS itself, allowing for a My Favorites menu for extreme overclockers to easily adjust their overclock settings.  Another big feature is the OC Panel, providing overclockers with adjustments on the fly as well as moving some features off the motherboard (VGA Hotwire, Sub-zero Sense, Slow Mode/Pause buttons) and as a direct result increasing POST time into older operating systems.  The OC Panel works with the Z87 ROG range as well.

The motherboard is also filled to the brim with USB 3.0 ports (eight) and SATA ports (ten, four SATA 6 Gbps) due to additional controllers, and one additional feature I like on motherboards is the included 802.11ac WiFi.  Given that this last feature is now on some $150 motherboards, the only restriction to having it on the high end products is implementation and routing.  ASUS also equip the motherboard with their SupremeFX audio setup, although to be honest it did not perform well in our test as hoped.  The motherboard might also be considered lacking in some areas (Thunderbolt, dual Intel NIC) for users with specific needs – there are other products on the market to cater for these prosumers.

There are two main issues ASUS will have to contend with in terms of the RIVBE, one of which they have no control over: the appeal of Ivy Bridge-E.  Users who migrated to Sandy Bridge-E have done so already, so one could argue that upgrading the motherboard is not necessarily a regular thing to do unless the original is limiting.  Users who waited for Ivy Bridge-E might not have been impressed by the performance gain and choose to wait until Haswell-E.  The chipset is also a factor – X79 is now old and a certain part of me wonders why Intel did not release an X89 update with full SATA 6 Gbps/native USB 3.0 while still keeping the chipset.  The last factor, as mentioned already, is pricing.  The ASUS Rampage IV Black Edition is certainly in the prosumer bracket, and users saving for a six-core processor might have to fall back on cheaper motherboards to implement their CPU choice.

Performance wise, the Black Edition performs as well as any other MultiCore Turbo enabled motherboard on the market at stock speeds, and it took our DDR3-2400 C10 memory kit in its stride.  The automatic overclock in the OS was a little underwhelming, although there are plenty of overclock options in the BIOS to get your teeth into.  No other motherboard manufacturer plays in this high end space (Extreme11 being a technological showcase), and for users with the budget, it is the board that should keep you going – until the next socket change at least, and the Rampage V series.