ASUS Republic of Gamers and X79 ROG Review – Rampage IV Gene, Formula and Extreme
by Ian Cutress on August 3, 2012 1:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Asus
- X79
- ROG
ASUS are actively trying to embrace the gaming community in a way that is substantially unprecedented for a non-gaming focused company. Any gamer or user, with or without an ROG product, can sign up to the ROG forums. The ROG forums are filled with like minded users who enjoy their technology and their gaming, free to share ideas, modifications and the like. What sets the ROG forums apart from most is the active participation by ASUS-employed gamers who are there to offer advice and help solve problems.
These community moderators and helpers are both tech freaks and gamers themselves, and have the same passion and enthusiasm as the members. If the user is willing to listen, these moderators will talk to the community and individuals about how to fix their problem or improve their experiences of certain products, helping users get the most out of their products. All of this comes at no extra charge.
ROG Forums
The forums themselves are split, as you may imagine, between different component types and then Intel/AMD/NVIDIA as required. There is a main section for technical talk – help with suggestions for rig building, or a place for modders to show off their builds. There is also a section for gaming, for ROG forum users to discuss latest releases or tactics. A relatively recent addition to the forums is the ROG Pro section, which features help on MemTweakIt and ROG Exchange (explained later)
Articles
Unlike any other motherboard originated, gaming focused community, the community moderators at the ROG forums also write articles and guides for everyone. This can be as basic as installing a sound card, or more complex describing the myriad of overclocking options on product XYZ. These are not your typical guides – painstakingly written over pages and pages and then published online for everyone to use in step-by-step fashion and every section is explained. If there is a section that is not explained as clearly as you would like, the moderators or other forum users are more than keen to help (on a personal note, as long as the request is polite rather than a demand, users are more willing to lend aid).
As ROG is also aimed at overclockers, there are also series of blog posts aimed at what several of the internal ASUS overclockers and R&D have achieved in terms of competitive overclocking. 24/7 overclocking is more focused in the guides, but for extreme (liquid nitrogen) scores pushing the hardware to the limits, there are videos and explanations of what these world champion overclockers are doing.
Now, how about a look at our ROG X79 motherboards we have in for testing?
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jontech - Friday, August 3, 2012 - link
But sounds kind of cool,.Helps that Asus makes it :)
Paulman - Friday, August 3, 2012 - link
Asus Republic of Gamers also holds Starcraft tournaments, as well! That's how I first heard of their brand. In fact, the ASUS ROG Starcraft II Summer 2012 tournament is on right now and I'm watching a game vs. EG.IdrA and EG.Puma (same team, but one American teammate versus a Korean teammate).For more info on this tourney, see: http://rog.asus.com/142982012/gaming/join-the-rog-...
primeval - Friday, August 3, 2012 - link
A fun tournament thus far.For the branding portion of this article, I highly recommend checking out some of ASUS ROG's commercials. They have been playing throughout the aforementioned tournament and I have to say they are probably the best hardware commercials I have ever seen in terms of production quality. I think that if you see a few of those commercials, you may be able to further rationalize the branding award.
Meaker10 - Friday, August 3, 2012 - link
1x/16x/8x/16x would kill any dual card setup in a micro atx case, kinda defeating the point....just4U - Friday, August 3, 2012 - link
the 8x slot is rather pointless...danjw - Friday, August 3, 2012 - link
I would rather see an article on the Ivybridge ROG motherboards then the Sandybridge-E ones. These are very niche boards, though I guess that is only slightly less true of the Ivybridge boards. For heavily threaded and memory intensive applications Sandybridge-E will win. But not really on much else, though they are chosen by some just because they are the most expensive.StevoLincolnite - Friday, August 3, 2012 - link
Also, Sandy Bridge overclocks higher and throws out less heat, because of the silly design choice that Intel made in regards to the heat spreader compound.Not a problem for those who are up to the task of removing the IHS or lapping.
Sad part is that Ivy Bridge actually has nice thermals and power consumption at stock; which could have translated well for enthusiasts.
IvyBridge-E should be out within the next year, haswell will get released and the cycle shall continue.
Hopefully we get 8 core Ivybridge-E chips, which is severely lacking on the Socket 2011 platform with the 3930K's being die harvested 8 core chips, plus most socket 2011 motherboards will take an Ivybridge-e chip anyway, when they're released.
danjw - Friday, August 3, 2012 - link
I was just looking at "leaked" slide that shows Ivy Bridge-E out in Q3 2013 and Haswell out in Q2 2013. I really don't see what the point is of an Ivy Bridge-E if Haswell beats it to the market. With Sandy Bridge-E they released it before the Ivy Bridge tock. I just don't see why that would make much sense.Assimilator87 - Saturday, August 4, 2012 - link
Haswell will probably be limited to four cores, whereas Ivy Bridge-E will scale up to ten cores.mapesdhs - Wednesday, May 9, 2018 - link
I was hunting for R4E refs and found this. It's strange reading what people expected was going to happen back when the R4E was new. IB-E with 10 cores eh? Oh well. Mind you, that did happen with IB-EP, and infact the XEON E5-2680 v2 is one of the best upgrades one can do for an X79 mbd, at least for threaded performance anyway. Hard to avoid wondering how things would have panned out if the 3930K had simply been a fully functional 8-core in the first place, instead of the crippled sampled chip consumers were offered. However, I obtained quite a few, and they still work pretty well, especially with so many PCIe lanes to play with, and it's cool being able to use a 950 Pro to boot from NVMe (comes with its own boot ROM), though the ROG forum does have a thread with custom BIOS profiles available to add native NVMe boot support to various ASUS mbds.