ASUS ROG Rampage III Extreme LGA1366 Motherboard Preview

ASUS ROG Rampage III Extreme LGA1366 Motherboard Preview

Like the reviewers here at Hardware Canucks, the ASUS ROG team is hard at work, and we are having trouble keeping up to them. Most recently, Mike posted a preview of two new ASUS video cards based on the 5870 series including a ROG 5870 Matrix. A lunar cycle or two before the 5870 Matrix, SKYMTL introduced the brand new ASUS Maximus III Extreme, yet another high-end piece of hardware from the shelves of the ROG department at ASUS. Then, just the other night, Mike posted another preview of the Crosshair IV AMD motherboard. I wanted to get in on the action so today I present, the yet to be released, ASUS Rampage III Extreme. And you guessed it, the Republic Of Gamers strike again.

The Rampage Extreme lineage goes back to mid 2008 when the now legend "REX" hit the streets and became THE LGA775 motherboard for benching. In fact, the original Rampage Extreme is still a highly pursued motherboard for C2D benching. The legend was born, but arguments can be made that the ball was dropped with the second coming. There is no point in hiding the fact that atop the HWBot.org rankings, the results were not dominated by the Rampage II Extreme. The first round of the X58 motherboard battle royal went to the Classified, the ROG team did not accept that. In steps the Rampage III Extreme.

At this point in time, the ASUS Rampage III Extreme is still in beta stages with only engineering samples roaming the wild. As such, the BIOS is also still in the beta stage and thus, the results shown here today are officially labeled...you guessed it, beta. We were quite surprised when we first received our engineering sample that the board was already very polished, and the BIOS updates have been coming in at a steady pace with improvements coming with every iteration. The latest BIOS has answered a number of our requests including updated RTL control and full compatibility with CPU-Tweaker in Windows. This preview is not intended to be a review, simply an early look to whet the appetite at what appears to be a very promising new offering from within the Republic Of Gamers lab.