<h1> Asus Maximus VII Ranger </h1>

ASUS' Republic of Gamers range has a new member of the family with this new generation. Next to the already known Impact (Mini-ITX) , Gene (Micro-ATX), Hero (ATX, aimed at gamers), Formula (ATX, aimed at case modders)and Extreme (ATX, aimed at overclockers)
the Ranger is introduced. The Ranger is also aimed at gamers, but at a cheaper price and positioned under the Hero models. It is basically ASUS answer to the cheaper gaming boards produced by ASRock, Gigabyte and MSI that were quite successful in the previous generation.The new Formula and Extreme models have not been introduced yet, these are coming in June and will be presented at the Computex, together with the new Devil's Canyon processors.

Asus Maximus VII Ranger review by Vortez

Back to the Ranger, a cheaper gaming motherboard, but still in the typical red and black RoG colour scheme, including the newly designed heatsinks. The ranger looks a bit bare but it is not an ugly motherboard. the board has three PCI-Express x16 slots and three PCI-Express x1 slots. The usual creative solutions with lanes has been applied, the first two are fed by the CPU's 16 lanes, the third by the four lanes provided by the chipset. These four again are shared lanes, they have to share with the first and second PCI-Express x1 slots and the M.2 slot.




An M.2-slot for a PCI-Express SSD is present, and we find the six SATA 600 ports that are available through the chipset. USB 3.0 and 2.0 both have 6 ports available.
The onboard SupremeFX sound card is based on a Realtek ALC1150 codec, met bespoke drivers that offer, among other things, DTS Connect. ASUS' Sonic Radar software is also part of the drivers, producing a visual radar screen overlay where other players are based on the sounds of the game. The Soundstage button on the motherboard switches between several equalizer and sound effects within the drivers. As mentioned before this is a nice gimmick but we do not find it overly useful. The sound quality of the SurpremeFX solution and headphone connection are excellent
ASUS again chooses for an Intel network chip, as they say that this performs better than a Killer chip. We have never been able to prove differences in actual performance between the chips, but the quality of the Intel chip is very good. The other advantage of the Killer chip, QoS possibilities and smart drivers, are compensated by ASUS' bespoke drivers offering the same possibilities for the Intel chip.
The board has an 8 phase power supply for the CPU and five 4-pin internal fan headers. The additional features are limited, there is an onboard power button, a mem-OK button, a HEX-display and BIOS Flashback button. In Windows Asus provides software to turn any keyboard into a "gaming keyboard", which basically is nothing else than the ability of assigning macros to function keys. A clever and handy feature, but it remains a software solution and not a hardware based one.
The Ranger's BIOS is, as with all the other RoG boards, set in a red colour scheme. The board is not specifically aimed at overclocking, but there are enough possibilities should you want to.

Specification of the Maximus VII Ranger

What's special about it?

The Asus Maximus VII Ranger provide a new function to user which is the KeyBot . The Keybot enable user to customize their function keys from F1-F10 on the keyboard to set the shortcut of it to bring up the application like mail, browsing or multimedia function. Meanwhile the F11 to boost up user's cpu and the F12 to enable extreme memory profiles ( These functions can be seen at the link here . ) . It is easy to use as user can just plug in the keyboard via dedicated USB socket to active the exculsive KeyBot and assign the shortcut to the function keys.

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