[section_title title=”Closer Look”]Closer Look
Taking a look at the board as a whole and there is no denying that this is in fact part of the ROG lineup. It has a matte black PCB and is coated with black nickel. It has red accenting in all the right places, while I am personally not a fan of red anything it is impossible to deny ASUS have done a great job in designing the Crossblade Ranger, or any of the ROG boards for that matter.
Taking a look at the top of the board and we can of course see the 8-pin CPU power connector, the mosfet heatsinks, the FM2+ CPU Socket and the 4 x RAM slots which can handle DDR3 ram upto 2666MHz in Overclock mode.
To the right of the RAM slots is a bit more fun. ASUS have made the Crossblade Ranger a great board for enthusiasts and those looking to overclock as well. There is a Debug LED that will let us know if there are any errors during POST, below this is a Start(power) and reset buttons so when overclocking there is no need to connected a case power button to the board. There is also a switch to put the board into LN2 mode and a MemOK button.
On the bottom half of the board we can see the PCI Expansion slots, 2 x PCIe 3.0/2.0 x16 (Single at x16, dual at x8/x8, red) *2
1 x PCIe 2.0 x16 (max at x4 mode, black),2 x PCIe 2.0 x1 and 2 x PCI. There is also a nice ROG themed heatsink ontop of the A88X chipset.
As previously mentioned the Crossblade Ranger comes equipped with SupremeFX which is said to produce audio quality as good as a dedicated external sound card. It has a physical PCB isolation which can be seen by the greenish/brown line coming from the SupremeFX chip, this also glows red when the board is getting power.
Along the bottom is the normal host of ports and connectors with the exception of a few new addons. As you will be able to see there is a SoundStage button which is designed to apply the best sound pertaining to the genre of game you are playing. There is also a CLR_CMOS button for those interested in overclocking and that need easy access to clear the CMOS without having to enter the BIOS
The rear IO has all the normal connections on it which include –
1 x PS/2 keyboard/mouse combo port(s)
1 x DVI-D
1 x D-Sub
1 x HDMI
1 x LAN (RJ45) port(s)
4 x USB 3.0 (blue)
2 x USB 2.0
1 x Optical S/PDIF out
6 x Audio jack(s)
1 x USB BIOS Flashback Button(s)
Just a few random images I shot while I had the board out!
Any idea why the performance results are so much lower for the MSI A88XI board? Same CPU and same chipset, you’d expect the numbers to be similar… but that performance delta is HUGE!
It could be down to a number of things, advancements in drivers between the launch between them; with the APU focusing heavily on AMD software/drivers, it does make sense. But I appreciate what you are saying etc!