Saturday, January 9th 2010
ASUS Rampage III Extreme Smiles for the Camera
One of ASUS' premier offers for this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) event is a new high-end socket LGA-1366 motherboard, the Republic of Gamers (ROG) Rampage III Extreme. The board succeeds the Rampage II Extreme which launched over an year ago along with Intel's then new Core i7 series processors. The new model based on the Intel X58 Express + ICH10R chipset, comes with four well spaced out PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slots, a new set of overclocking enhancements such as the ROG connect which lets you control the motherboard's overclocking from any Bluetooth and Java enabled mobile phone, SATA 6 Gb/s and USB 3.0 connectivity using ASUS' innovative PCI-Express 2.0 bridge implementation, and a more powerful CPU VRM to keep the board stable with bleeding-edge settings.
The board features an enhanced CPU VRM which is now powered by two 8-pin ATX connectors apart from two 4-pin Molex connectors. Some of these could be redundant and needed only for electrical stability. The CPU and memory power circuitry makes use of super-ML capacitors for cleaner power delivery. Voltage readouts are located next to the DIMM slots for accessibility. The motherboard makes use of slimmer component heatsinks that look to be made of the ceramic composite which the TUF Sabertooth P55 motherboard uses.
Expansion slots include four PCI-Express 2.0 x16 (electrical x16, NC, x16, NC; or x8, x8, x8, x8) depending on how they are populated, and one each of PCI-Express 2.0 x4 and PCI. A PLX ExpressLane PEX 8613 bridge chip is used to give out up to 12 PCI-Express 2.0 lanes (using three ports) connecting to the southbridge using its PCI-Express 1.1 x4 link, so that any PCI-E 2.0 device can make use of that amount of bandwidth. Devices connected to it include a Marvell 2-port SATA 6 Gb/s controller, and an NEC 2-port USB 3.0 controller. Connectivity includes 8-channel audio with optical SPDIF output, gigabit Ethernet, Bluetooth, eSATA, USB 2.0 and 3.0. The Rampage III Extreme should come out in Q1, just in time for Intel's 32 nm Core i7 980X six-core processor based on the Westmere architecture.
Source:
Tom's Hardware
The board features an enhanced CPU VRM which is now powered by two 8-pin ATX connectors apart from two 4-pin Molex connectors. Some of these could be redundant and needed only for electrical stability. The CPU and memory power circuitry makes use of super-ML capacitors for cleaner power delivery. Voltage readouts are located next to the DIMM slots for accessibility. The motherboard makes use of slimmer component heatsinks that look to be made of the ceramic composite which the TUF Sabertooth P55 motherboard uses.
105 Comments on ASUS Rampage III Extreme Smiles for the Camera
They're for supplying power to the mobo.
Long live eVGA.
At any rate, I'm unimpressed by this board. Asus has been overhyped in the past couple of generations in my book. I think Gigabyte and EVGA have been doing a much better job.
Throw some waterblocks on it, overclock an i7 980, hooked up three watercooled 5870s, 24 GB of ram (someone check on this), and you're ready to go.
There are two SPDIF coax and optical to hook it up to your stereo system. USB 3.0 and Sata 6
Plus it's got a ton of quality capacitors that aren't cheap.
What else do you need? lol
Sorry, but there are better choices for my money. I'd much rather have the EVGA or GB boards.
As for the bluetooth on the fly support, same thing. I would love to be able to NOT use the aging old crap bios to overclock my cpu and change voltages.
And sorry guys, but Asus has been doing the red and black color scene before eVGA decided to make "Classified" BS.
Besides EVGA's product availability and service network sucks outside North America. ASUS on the other hand, can service a Rampage III Extreme even in any Indian city with 10,000 population.
Excellent board. Highly Recommended!