ASUS Rampage IV Extreme (Intel X79) Motherboard Review

The replacement for the fantastic X58 chipset is here in the shape of the X79. We can’t tell you all about it yet, you’ll have to wait a little longer for the ins and outs, but we know you’re all gagging to get a look at the motherboards. The ASUS Rampage III Extreme was one of the most popular enthusiast level motherboards on the market so we’re pretty sure that the ASUS Rampage IV Extreme will follow in those footsteps.

Something always stirs our soul when we see a new Rampage board. Flicking open the Velcro front reveals the first clues of what X79 brings us. But we’ll leave you waiting a moment longer.

This little box of tricks is the ASUS RoG OC Key. This plugs into the graphics card and allows you to overclock the system in real time with an on-screen display and live hardware monitoring. Potentially a game-changing box of tricks and we can’t wait to try it out.

And here it is in all its glory. The eagle-eyed amongst you will instantly be drawn to the DIMM sockets, all eight of them. The socket itself is the latest Intel 2011 one, and ASUS have given us the option of retaining our LGA1366 CPU cooler if we desire. Very helpful for those with monster air-coolers, or a water loop.

The business end of the Rampage IV Extreme has a really cool feature. The top PCI Express slot has a triple slot gap before the next one. Really useful if you’re fortunate enough to own the ASUS Mars II for example, but equally almost and GPU will benefit from a bit of extra space to maximise airflow.

The certainly isn’t a shortage of SATA options. Alongside that are some temperature monitoring points, if you’re the kind of person who is on first name terms with your local LN2 supplier this could prove very handy indeed.

There certainly is a lot of power available to the board, with an 8 Pin and 4 Pin connector behind the CPU socket. As well as the usual ASUS high-end features, there is also a cool feature that allows you to ‘hotwire’ your system for extremely fine voltage control without having to trim variable resistors.

The IO at the back has nearly everything you could wish for, including a plethora of USB ports. It’s been a while since we’ve seen active cooling on an ASUS Intel board. We hope that it’s more precautionary.

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Windows 8 makes Intel very, very happy

(Credit: Intel)

To say Intel CEO Paul Otellini is upbeat about the prospects for Microsoft’s Windows 8 may be a bit of an understatement. In fact, Otellini said Windows 8 is “one of the best things that’s ever happened to our company.”

That’s one pretty heady statement. Speaking at a Credit Suisse technology conference, Otellini batted away worries that he called myths surrounding Intel. These myths covered the idea that ARM will hurt Intel, that the PC is toast and that the chip giant can’t do mobile well.

(Credit: Intel)

A lot of those worries—myths in Intel’s view—have links to Windows 8. Here’s what Otellini said about Windows 8:

We are very excited about Windows 8. I think it’s one of the best things that’s ever happened to our Company. And it’s a very good operating system, not just for PCs, but we think also will allow tablets to really get a legitimacy into mainstream computing, particularly in enterprises that they don’t have today. A lot of the enterprise managers are worried about security, they’re worried about the difficulty affording their legacy applications over to an Android tablet or to an iPad.

What Microsoft is doing is making that seamless for them. And they have a new experience, which they call Metro, that’s the interface up there. But for Intel-based machines, there is also one button that basically takes you back to your classic Windows experience and that’s a software button essentially.

So you’re just running one manifestation of the operating system with two different GUIs, if you will, it’s not running on virtual machines, it’s one manifestation. So this gives us, x86, in particular, I think a unique advantage as Windows 8 comes to market, because we can take advantage of all the legacy that was ever written, and all of the fact that all the drivers for the mice and for printers and every other USB device in the world. For example, getting photos off your camera and onto a tablet.

Try that if you don’t have a driver, doesn’t work. On the other hand, if that tablet is running [an extension] of Windows, it’s going to work just like it works with the PC today. So there is a huge advantage built in that we think we have as the Windows 8 products start launching.

Those comments followed a question about the ARM architecture. Otellini argued that Windows 8 on ARM will have a few natural disadvantages—notably support for legacy applications. Otellini likened Windows 8 on ARM to the transition when Apple moved from PowerPC to Intel. In other words, the switch isn’t trivial.

On other key points:

Emerging markets are driving PC sales. Otellini said that the PC is far from dead. In fact, China, Brazil and India are heavily populated countries where an emerging middle class is buying PCs.

The PC has become stale, but the industry is fixing that problem. Otellini said:

One of the things that we have to do though as an industry and as a Company is to make sure that the PC remains vibrant. I think it’s gotten a little stale, to some extent. There was a rush to the bottom, in terms of lowering the costs and taking features out and making the PC a little bit more boring than their counterparts in consumer electronics, for example, the iPad kinds of devices. So Intel is set out to redefine the PC again and we’ve done this several times in the past in our history. This one is very interesting.

It’s an initiative that we call, Ultrabook. This is about thinner, sleeker, faster, more responsive PCs, longer battery life, more secure, but also at a mainstream price point. The Apple MacBook Air has been out for several years now, but it’s a high — it’s a premium priced device.

CES will be about mobile for Intel, which will deliver high performance at lower power.Otellini said:

All the major vendors are now, silicon vendors are moving to a model where you develop these Form Factor Reference Designs, where you basically lock down the components and validate them on networks, on the 3G, 4G networks that are out there such that they can go — our customers can go through IOT testing very quickly to get on — into the market.

And you’ll see a number of Intel customers using the guts of this phone to go into the market in the first half of next year, and we’ll have more announcements on that at CES. But what I’ve done here is, we’ve measured this phone against the other top-five-selling — high-selling smartphones that are out there today. And on the top chart, this is power, lower is better, right, and so standby 3G, we’re not the best, but we’re pretty darn close. For audio playback, we are the second best and well ahead of the pack. And on 720p video playback, again better than most and almost the best-in-class.

(Credit: Intel)

This story originally appeared at ZDNet's Between the Lines under the headline "Intel's Otellini: Windows 8 'one of best things' for company."

Related articles

• Intel's Otellini: Windows 8 'one of best things' for company (zdnet.com)
• Windows 8 makes Intel very, very happy (news.cnet.com)

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MacBook Air, Ultrabook spell doom for optical drive

HP's new 13-inch Folio Ultrabook. As with the MacBook Air, a built-in optical drive is not an option.

(Credit: Hewlett-Packard)

With Apple likely forgoing optical drives across all or most of its MacBooks, and Ultrabooks doing the same, it's no surprise that the venerable whirring drive will spin away, albeit gradually, into obscurity.

Next to go driveless at Apple is the 15-inch MacBook Air. 9to5Mac says Apple almost brought out a 15-inch Air in late 2010 (but didn't because of a problem with the hinges). Apple now has plans to make this happen next year when Intel's graphics-centric Ivy Bridge processor ships.

Ultrabooks will do their part to hurry the otherwise slow demise of the optical drive. As many as 50 Ultrabooks are expected to debut at CES this year, and all of them will come without the drives, since by definition the design cannot accommodate the bulk of an optical drive.

Optical drives would have faded even more quickly if it wasn't for the dreaded focus group. PC makers like Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Toshiba almost always test their design concepts with focus groups, who almost always say something to the effect of: "yeah, why not throw in an optical drive just in case." So PC makers have inevitably done that in the past.

Apple is different. The Apple of Steve Jobs held focus groups in contempt. In essence, Jobs believed consumers don't know what they want until you give it to them. So, present them with a MacBook Air--as Apple did in January 2008--and consumers will eventually come around.

Which they did. But this time it's not just consumers but the whole PC industry. And Intel--the real force behind Ultrabooks--has adopted Jobsian thinking to drive the market to these skinny laptops. "We are not waiting for this to happen. We're going to create the future, and that's fundamentally what this transition is all about," Erik Reid, a manager at Intel in charge of the Ultrabook platform, said this week.

But for readers who are feeling the hackles rising on the back of their neck as they read this, no need to worry. Consumers will always be able to waltz into a Best Buy and find an inexpensive laptop with an optical drive. And PC makers will continue to sell plenty of models with DVD/RW and Blu-ray players. It's just that more and more people will be buying laptops (and/or tablets) sans optical drive, blissfully unaware or unconcerned that it's missing.

Related articles

• MacBook Air, Ultrabook spell doom for optical drive (news.cnet.com)

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Oracle: Reports of Itanium's life greatly exaggerated

A wafer of Itanium 9300 processors.

(Credit: Intel)

Oracle filed court papers this week alleging that a "secret" deal between Itanium developers HP and Intel is the only reason for the continued existence of the chip--for which the business-software giant is ending its support.

"HP has secretly contracted with Intel to keep churning out Itaniums so that HP can maintain the appearance that a dead microprocessor is still alive," reads the filing, which All Things Digital's Arik Hesseldahl describes as a routine affair about the discovery process and timing in HP's lawsuit against Oracle for dropping the chip.

HP alleges that Oracle's motivation for ending Itanium support is the latter company's acquisition of Sun Microsystems and its server business, which relies on Intel x86 chips. Oracle, HP claims, is simply trying to convince Itanium customers that the chip isn't long for this world and to get them to switch to x86-based servers like Sun's.

Oracle, on the other hand, says HP's desire to keep customers on Itanium is based on the fact that the Itanium-reliant HP UX operating system commands more in service fees than would a system based on x86 chips. This "led HP to craft a top-secret plan to create a false perception that Itanium still had a future," Hesseldahl quotes the Oracle filing as saying. "HP understands that the future prospects of IT products drive customer purchasing decisions. A buyer who knew that Intel saw no future for Itanium, and was only continuing to invest in the line pursuant to a contractual obligation, would devalue the future prospects of Itanium servers and be less inclined to buy."

In a statement to Hesseldahl, HP fires back. "This filing is just the latest in [Oracle's] ongoing campaign to shore up its failing Sun server business and starve thousands of existing Itanium customers who rely on their Itanium processors for mission-critical activities.

"As Oracle well knows, HP and Intel have a contractual commitment to continue to sell mission-critical Itanium processers to our customers through the next two generations of microprocessors, thus ensuring the availability of Itanium through at least the end of the decade. HP is resolved to enforcing Oracle's commitments to HP and our shared customers and will continue to take actions to protect its customers' best interests."

HP filed its lawsuit in June of this year. And in August, then-CEO Leo Apotheker acknowledged that the Itanium flap was hurting business, saying, "Revenue in business-critical systems declined 9 percent year over year. This decline is sharper than expected as our ability to close deals has been impacted by Oracle's decision and orders are being delayed or canceled. We are working diligently to enforce the commitments that Oracle has made to our customers and to HP."

The Itanium chip was introduced in 1996 and has long been the butt of industry jokes owing to its failure to live up to its developers' hopes--instead of becoming the server market's "unifying architecture," spanning many server lines and operating systems, it's been relegated to a high-end niche.

Intel had no comment for Hesseldahl, but the company has said before that it stands behind Itanium. When Oracle announced, in March, that it was dropping support for the chip, Intel CEO Paul Ottelini said, "We remain firmly committed to delivering a competitive, multi-generational roadmap for HP-UX and other operating system customers that run the Itanium architecture."

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