ASUS officially revealed its new High-end Desktop (HEDT) motherboards, designed to accommodate both AMD’s and Intel’s current HEDT CPUs. These motherboards are the ROG Zenith Extreme Alpha and ROG Rampage VI Extreme Omega.
The ROG Zenith Extreme Alpha is a follow-up to the original ROG Zenith Extreme motherboard, which first came on to the scene back in 2017 with the launch of AMD’s first-generation Ryzen Threadripper processors. The motherboard is based on the X399 chipset and employs a TR4 socket to hold the Ryzen Threadripper CPU in place. It also comes with eight RAM slots, capable of supporting up to 128GB of DDR4 RAM at a maximum frequency of 3600MHz, overclocked.
Further, the ROG Zenith Extreme Alpha comes with four PCIe 3.0 x16 slots, 8 SATA 6GB/s ports, two M.2 2242 – 22110 slots, and one M.2 2240 – 2280 slot. All three M.2 slots of the X399 motherboard natively support the lightning fast PCIe NVMe Gen3 x4 standard. The motherboard also supports five USB 3.1 Gen2 ports – one via a front panel connector, one through a Type-C port, and the remainder as Type-A ports. For network and Bluetooth connectivity, the motherboard comes a built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and antenna, plus an Aquantia AQC-107 10 gigabit LAN port.
Moving the ROG Rampage VI Extreme Omega bears similar hardware to the ROG Zenith Extreme Omega, save for some pretty obvious differences. There motherboard is based on Intel’s LGA 2066 chipset, and is designed to house the enthusiast level X299 Core-X CPUs.
The ROG Rampage VI Extreme Omega has the capability to house up to 128GB of DDR4 RAM, albeit at a higher maximum clockspeed of 4266MHz. It also has one less PCIe 3.0 x16 lane than its AMD counterpart, and depending on the CPU installed on it, the amount of PCIe lanes allocated for each slot differs.
Other specifications include six SATA 6GB/s ports, three M.2 M.2 2242 – 22110 slots, and one M.2 2240 – 2280 slot. Unlike the ROG Zenith Extreme Alpha, this motherboard only features three USB 3.1 Gen2 ports – one via the front panel connector, one Type-C port, and one Type-A port. Most importantly, both motherboards support 3-way multi-GPU support, either via NVIDIA’s SLI or AMD’s mGPU technology.
The ASUS ROG Zenith Extreme Alpha and ROG Rampage VI Extreme Omega are already available at all authorised ASUS resellers and PC shops. The ROG Zenith Extreme Alpha is priced at RM2759, while the ROG Rampage VI Extreme Omega will retail for RM3165. Both motherboards comes with a 3+1 year warranty.
