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ASUS Rampage III Extreme is one of X48-based Intel motherboards which is the latest offering from ASUS marketed towards the performance user or overclocking enthusiast. The ASUS Rampage III Extreme is a work of art. Following the standard red and black ASUS ROG design, the heatsinks certainly are incredible. The area surrounding the CPU socket even has the caps in a nice triangular pattern and there are holes for both 1366 coolers and 775 coolers. So, you can bring your old cooler along when you upgrade, and for the extreme overclockers who have a LN2 pot custom designed, to be able to use that instead of getting a new one fabricated is a boon. The LN2 switch of this ASUS mainboard will helps recover the processor from the frozen state that can occur when you've been using exotic cooling for too long. ASUS Rampage III Extreme mainboard has a couple of fantastic things. Firstly the ProbeIt which allows you to accurately check the current voltages using a multimeter. Above those are four dip switches for turning on and off the PCI-E lanes. These dip switches allow you to diagnose PCI Express problems without removing all your cards or, even worse, draining your loop. All PCI-E expansion ports of this Intel Mainboard are very nicely spaced out and it's good to see the old PCI-E x1 that used to be at the top of every expansion port layout has been eliminated. The more airflow the better and as PCI-E x1 never took off it's nice to see it has gone. The rear IO panel of the ASUS Rampage III Extreme has all the things just like another high-end Intel motherboards, such as PS2, CMOS reset, USB 2 ports, USB3 ports, LAN, Firewire, eSATA, Audio and the ROG Connect. As we'd expect from any ASUS product, the accessories included are bountiful. We have the user guide and CD, the IO shield, a ROG Connect cable and the Bluetooth ROG Connect should you have a Bluetooth PDA to hand. A full selection of connectors is included, like standard SATA cables and USB header, a Crossfire, SLI and hard Tri-SLI bridge. ASUS Rampage III Extreme motherboard also have the connectors for ProbeIt and the front-panel block. An additional heatsink and 40mm fan for the Northbridge, should you require additional cooling. It's nice to see ASUS have kept the design similar to the board rather than use an off-the-shelf part that doesn't match. In fact only one thing was slightly nigglesome. Given that this will be the new flagship ASUS motherboard, only having two SATA 6Gbps ports is disappointing. Considering how long you're likely to have this Intel board in your possession ASUS really should have given us more. The ASUS Rampage III Extreme motherboard can also clearly handle the new six core Gulftown processor from Intel as well.
Labels: ASUS, Intel
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