Layout

At a first glance the ASUS Maximus VII Ranger looks very good with its elegant and sleek design. Once again the ROG colors, red, black and white, suite nicely and together with the matte black PCB make for a beautiful product. The layout itself is well thought and there is plenty of space around the CPU socket to install even the largest CPU coolers on the market. The fact that there are SATA connector which have been angled by 90 degree allow easy installation of oversized graphics cards. The only PCIe 3.0 x16 slot on this board is the first red one. Pairing up two graphics cards in SLI/Crossfire mode will make them both run at x8. The motherboard also features another black PCIe wich runs in PCIe x4 mode.



The ASUS Maximus VII Ranger comes with a digital 8+2 phase power design. The CPU gets eight phases and the memory gets a stable current supply from two individual phases. Furthermore, ASUS equipped this motherboard with their so called "10k Black Metallic Chokes", which can cope with up to 60A per phase and can resist temperatures ranging from -70°C to +125°C. This makes the power desing even better for extreme overclocking where extremely low temperatures around the CPU socket can be reached.



In total, you will find four DIMM-slots on the Maximus VII Hero. Officially supported are DDR3 3200(O.C.) / 3100(O.C.) / 3000(O.C.) / 2933(O.C.) / 2800(O.C.) / 2666(O.C.) / 2600(O.C.) / 2500(O.C.) / 2400(O.C.) / 2200(O.C.) / 2133(O.C.) / 2000(O.C.) / 1866(O.C.) / 1800(O.C.) / 1600 / 1333 MHz. There is enough space between the DIMM-slots and the CPU socket which means that you will not encounter any compatibility problems with big coolers even when you choose to install RAM modules with big heatspreaders. Also supported are version 1.3 Xtreme Memory Profiles (XMP).



On the Maximus VII Ranger the southbridge is being cooled by a passive cooling block. A closer look at the area where the power VRMs are shows that there are two additional heatsinks, which have been connected using a heatpipe. If you are familiar with more expensive overclocking motherboards from ASUS, you know that it often features PLX bridge chip. In order to achieve a lower price point ASUS did not equip this board with such a chip.

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 4 - Layout
Page 2 - Specs and Delivery	Page 5 - Connectors and I/O
Page 3 - Features	Page 6 - Conclusion