Introduction the Rampage III Extreme

In 2006 ASUS® started Republic of Gamers (ROG) to provide quality components and maximum performance to gamers and power users.   ROG caters to the hard core gamers as well as the overclocking community.  Whether users are overclocking on air, water or even using extreme cooling such as liquid nitrogen, the ROG lineup of boards have been amongst the best.   If you don’t remember the original Rampage Extreme X48 motherboard, it was regarded as one of the best, if not THE best Socket 775 motherboard for overclocking.  Today, in an age where old motherboards drastically lose value, the original Rampage Extreme still sells for hundreds of dollars.  With the fame of the original Rampage Extreme, would the new Rampage III Extreme be hailed in the same regard?  Looking at the features list, accessories, software and technology included, it is apparent ASUS is striving to live up to the original name’s glory.

Features

ASUS has really blown us away with the amount of features it has added to the Rampage III Extreme.  With new features like ROG Connect and RC Bluetooth, ASUS is taking innovation to the next level with motherboards.  They have also included tons of features to help with overclocking, including a Liquid Nitrogen Mode, dual 8 pin EPS power connectors, ML Caps and more.  Let’s take a look at a few key features that they have added.

The Extreme Engine Digi+ is a hybrid of analog and digital design elements to produce a PWM with better accuracy that reduces switching delay time.  The motherboard uses this technology on the 8 Phase CPU PWM.  With this new design you are able to control the switching frequency for the PWM which allows overclockers push to the extreme limits.

ASUS understands that power users and gamers want to run SLI and Crossfire for the best performance, so they wisely included 4 PCI-E x16 slots to run 3-Way SLI or CrossfireX.  Another thing that ASUS did was to allow four PCI-E x16 dual slot cards to be installed without the need to make the motherboard longer in length.  Along with the four PCI-E x16 slots you can easily enable or disable each x16 slot from a switch near the top right of the motherboard.  This is very useful when diagnosing issues with water cooled video cards or even while extreme overclocking.

ASUS added a second bios chip in addition to a bios selector button.  An LED indication next to each bios chip indicates what bios chip is currently selected.  This makes it easy to test a new bios or recover if a bios becomes corrupt during overclocking.  This a very nice feature to have and can really come in handy.  Not only did they add a second bios chip, but using ROG Connect or a USB thumb drive you can do a bios recovery, which again makes things even easier.

ASUS Q-LED makes basic troubleshooting of motherboards very simple.  There are 4 red LEDs located near the 24 pin connector that light up during the post process.  The first one is the CPU Initialization LED, the second is the DRAM Initialization, the third is for VGA Initialization and the fourth is for Boot.

ProbeIt measurement points makes it easy to measure voltages using a regular digital multimeter.   It allows you to measure CPU, CPU PLL, QPI/DRAM, IOH, IOH PCI-E, ICH, ICH PCI-E, and DRAM voltages.

Specifications

The motherboard uses 100% solid state capacitors with ML capacitors on the CPU, Memory and QPI PWMs as well.  As previously mentioned, the motherboard uses a combination of design features from Analog PWM and Digital PWM taking the best parts of both.   They also include onboard power, reset, memok and clear CMOS buttons which comes in handy.  The motherboard has eight fan headers and three temperature sensor connectors.

Continue on to page 2 for Software, BIOS and Accessories.

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