Taking Gaming to the Extreme – The ASUS Rampage III Extreme Core i7 X58 Motherboard

 

One might be surprised at the size of the Rampage III Extreme, which at 269mm deep is a full-sized motherboard. In fact, it is even larger than a standard ATX board. While the Rampage II Extreme had not impressed many, the new Rampage III Extreme is based around the reliable X58 chipset so that all the LGA1366 CPUs are supported including the very popular Intel Core i7 980X Extreme CPU.

 

If you look closely at the Rampage III Extreme, you will find all the typical X58 features such as the six DDR3 memory sockets, SATA 3Gbps ports, USB 2 ports and a large number of expansion slots. In addition to all these, Asus has some very neat additions – the first is a small NEC chip that provides two USB 3 ports and the second is a Marvell 9128 chip (smaller than the NEC chip!) that power two SATA 6 Gbps ports. The Rampage III Extreme does sport four 16XPCI-E slots but using four graphics cards essentially means that each card receives only eight lanes of PCI-E 2.0 bandwidth each. When three cards are used, the slot nearest to the CPU socket will be able to get 16 lanes and the two slots after those, eight lanes. This means a pair of cards will get 16 lanes of bandwidth each.

 

It is important to note that the Rampage III Extreme is certified for both the 3-way as well as standard SLI and in CrossFireX, up to four cards. Further, unlike many other RoG boards, the Rampage III Extreme does not have a separate sound card. Instead it relies on a Realtec ALC889 audio codec.

 

The performance of the Rampage III Extreme is no doubt highly impressive. In most benchmark tests, it proved to be fairly fast even for a third-generation X58 motherboard. This makes it highly competitive against some of the fastest boards in the market – the Asus P6X58D Premium and the Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R. One also finds that the SATA ports are fairly fast too – tests have shown that the Intel ICH10R Southbridge ports have an average speed of 244MB/sec while the Marvell SATA 6Gbps ports have a speed just a little less, at 237MB/sec.

 

There is no doubt that the new Rampage III Extreme is wonderfully fast and offers great overclocking speeds allowing it to compete with the best X58 boards available today. Its well-designed BIOS is user-friendly allowing new gamers to easily overclock it while at the same time, it offers many other options that seasoned overclockers will find hard to resist.

 

At Evetech, you can take advantage of the Rampage III Extreme motherboard for a wonderful gaming experience. On the other hand, If you want us to custom-design a complete PC that will use the latest ASUS rampage III extreme motherboards and graphic cards contact our sales team on 012 653 0033 or submit a Custom Quote Request.