ASUS ROG Rampage III Extreme LGA1366 Motherboard Preview

Initial Impressions

This ended up turning into more than just a preview but the benching went relatively well despite the terrible chip we have, and when this type of benching environment goes well...we have learned to just let it ride. Thus far we have been very impressed with the Rampage III Extreme. As we have mentioned a couple times, the board and BIOS feel very mature for their age...and not in that "30 year old guy cruising university campuses picking up second year students" creepy kind of way. The R3E really is starting to come into its own. We have been in contact constantly with ASUS regarding the BIOS and everything we have asked for is being implemented. Needless to say, we are confident with where development is going and are really expecting a polished BIOS and board by the time it goes retail.

The feature-set this board offers is quite strong. There are a couple newer features we are starting to see with the entire ROG lineup including the R3E, like the ROG Connect software that enhances remote control of the motherboard from another machine or even a bluetooth enabled smart phone. The features available aren't just for overclockers either, this motherboard really is offering some useful tools for all users including USB3.0 connections and from what we can tell, an extremely cool running motherboard.

Keep in mind that the cooling we are using for testing is obviously not the stock cooling pictured above, but we are very pleased with how cool this motherboard runs. The analog/digital hybrid PWM is most impressive capable of running completely passive for most daily setups. Our MC14's we added to the PWM were absolutely overkill.

Most importantly, the BIOS despite being still in beta is already very strong; both in performance and features. The numbers we have seen thus far in our benching show an excellent X58 motherboard on par with the rest. The R3E can also clearly handle the new six core Gulftown processor from Intel as well. Under phase and LN2 it responded exactly as we wished, despite a less than ideal PSU setup. We'll shut this preview down for now, but keep your eyes peeled on the pages of Hardware Canucks.com for updates on when this promising board will be going retail.