First Look: Asus Rampage III Gene, Quad SLI, Ares HD 5970

Crosshair IV Extreme 4-way SLI Xpander

One of the more eye-catching (read mental) items on show was Asus’s new daughterboard accessory for the Rampage III Extreme that allows anyone with a PhD in Lunacy to run quad SLI on the board.

The daughterboard is a small PCB that plays host to four PCI-E slots and two Nvidia NF200 chips and it sits on top of the Rampage III Extreme, connecting to the motherboard via two PCI-E connectors. The two NF200s are required to allow the four compatible Nvidia cards to gang up in quad SLI to unleash the potential of both massive frame rates and massive disappointment, all in one superheated package.


Obviously the board isn’t designed for mass appeal - the Asus representative explained that less than 1% of its customers actually use quad SLI - but Asus claim it fills a gap for extreme benchmarkers. We can’t help but be suspicious of how well the board will work though given the fact that the four cards only essentially funnel down into two PCI-E slots and the fact that the NF200 chips can tend to run quite hot. Still, far be it from us to stand in the way of people chasing the fastest performance possible.


It’s likely to be a challenge cooling two such chips in such a small area and Asus have limited the cooling options available to them by placing the chips so close to the PCI-E slots. Asus did however state that the board we saw was a prototype and some changes may be made to the board to allow a suitable cooling solution to be fitted so we’ll reserve judgment until we see the final product.

The PCB also includes a generous number of power connectors - a necessity given that the juice it pulls through the two PCI-E slots it interfaces with won't be enough to power the four graphics cards it's capable of holding.



Further problems arise when you consider that fitting graphics cards to a motherboard in this way is means they'll no longer fit in your case given that they now sit a centimeter or so higher than they are meant to.

Interestingly Asus also let on that the reason they didn’t include two NF200 chips on the Rampage III Extreme in the first place (it does have four PCI-E slots after all) is that they believe graphics performance can suffers by some 1-2% can suffer when using the chip.

Asus were slightly cagey when asked about pricing for the board, again we were told that the product is only in the prototype stage, but it was suggested that the bundle would attempt to be price competitive with other quad SLI boards such as the EVGA X58 Classified.