The Asus Rampage III Black Edition is fully loaded and looks great with the menacing black colour scheme.
The board is supplied with 6 DIMMs supporting up to 48GB of DDR3 memory, right up to 2,200mhz. As this is a X58 motherboard, the memory is a triple channel design.
There are eight sata ports on the board, 6 of which are SATA 3.0 GB/s, controlled by the Intel ICH10R. This offers Raid 0,1,5 and 10 support. Next to this are 2 Sata 6.0 GB/s ports (grey), handled by the Marvell 9182 PCIe controller.
Above, a board schematic which shows an overview of the connectivity and specifications. The ‘Extreme Engine Digi+' is a high performance digital VRM design which can achieve the maximum performance levels with adjustable CPU PWM frequency. It expedites heat dissipation and achieves better electric conduction keeping critical components reliable.
The board has a dedicated ‘overclocking zone' which contains a reset and start button, as well as a ‘GO' Button. You can press this before post to enable MemOK! or to quickly load the preset profile for temporary overclocking while in the operating system. There is a debug LED next to this section which displays numbers which can be referenced in the manual to help with troubleshooting. The board supports ROG Connect which allows a laptop to be used, just like a race car engineer. You connect via a USB cable and can view post code in real time on the laptop. Its not something we ever use, but we can see some people finding it useful.
Next to the reset button are four switches which let the user enable or disable the corresponding PCIe x 16 slots. This means you can easily disable a slot with a card in it for troubleshooting or testing configurations. We think this is a rather ingenious idea.
Close to the ram slots is a 3 pin jumper switch which is tagged as ‘LN2'. This ships in the disabled position, but can be enabled to help combat the cold boot bug during POST when using hardcore cooling solutions such as Liquid Nitrogen.
Onboard sound is handled by the capable Supreme FX XFi 2 processor. It features EAX 5.0 and OpenAL for ultra-real cinematic in-game audio. It comes with THX TruStudio Pro, which enhances games, music and movies. SupremeFX X-Fi 2 also implements gold-plated jacks and high quality capacitors to ensure high definition adventures in audio.
The board is fully equipped with an array of passively cooled heatsinks to keep the VRM's cool under load. They are strategically positioned so oversized CPU coolers can be used. We fitted a giant Noctua NH D14 without any trouble.
The board has several power connectors across the schematic to ensure stable performance under heavy load conditions. Under the bottom PCIe Slot is a Molex connector which is to feed extra power to the PCIe slots and graphics cards. We found it didn't really make much difference during testing, two AMD HD6990's were perfectly stable in Quad Crossfire with or without it connected. There are also two EATX12V connectors to supply a high level of power to the CPU (the removable rubber caps are over 4 pins on each connector in the image above). There is a ‘Q reset' button next to these which temporarily stops the power feed to the CPU, to help it recover from a frozen condition. Asus have also included a dual bios configuration on the board so the user can recover to another bios in case of major issues occurring.
The back panel supports the following connectivity:
- 1 x PS/2 Keyboard
- 2 x External SATA ports
- 1 x LAN(RJ45) port(s)
- 2 x USB 3.0/2.0 (Blue)
- 7 x USB 2.0/1.1 (1 port also for ROG Connect)
- 8 -Channel Audio I/O
- 1 x Clr CMOS switch
- 2 x Wi-Fi antenna jacks
- 1 x ROG Connect On/Off switch