the Rampage 3 Extreme is probably the motherboard I've received more requests
for an unboxing for than any other board in the history of my channel so let's
start with the actual uh motherboard itself the basic features it is a
rampage series board so that means it is part of their highest tier of
motherboards even within the Republic of Gamers brand so it's a 1366 motherboard
it supports LGA 1366 of course including
Intel's latest six core processors so you got support for all Cor 7 Extreme as
well as all core i7 1366 CPUs you've got
support for SLI and Crossfire up to threeway but that gets a little bit more
complicated and I'll tell you more once we get the board opened up the box is
huge and comes with a window so you can
see the motherboard on the store shelf you can see they've got uh we'll talk
more about the board after so basic features you've got their Rog connect so
you can plug the motherboard into another computer and overclock with the
other computer you've got Extreme Engine dig plus so that means you've got
digital pwm USB BIOS flashback more on
that in a little bit and it also includes some bundled software 3D Mark
Vantage and kasperski antivirus now this motherboard actually introduces besides
that USB BIOS flash feature two pretty
unique ways to flash the BIOS so one is
just by loading the BIOS onto a USB stick plugging it into the back of the
motherboard and then it just automatically flashes and then the other
is the two separate BIOS chips which can be flashed with two different settings
or they can be set with two different settings and you can Flash from one to
the other in order to actually maintain two completely different overclocking
profiles like you could have one for 24/7 and then one for whenever you're
you're doing some extreme benching or whatever and then you can automatically go back to your old one you got a
three-way SLI Bridge included you've also got a h oh I think this is that
little Bluetooth thing yeah this is a uh a Bluetooth module so comes with
Bluetooth that's pretty cool then you've got whatever is in here which I will
find out what it is for you okay we got
a couple screws and then we got some uh
Bubbles and then we got a little fan okay well we'll have to find out what
that hooks up to you can see it's like an anodized red heat sink so that's
probably what the heat sink on the motherboard's Finish is going to look like they've actually applied a proper
thermal compound and a reasonable amount of it I'm really impressed to see that
most mother man motherboard manufacturers don't get that
detail IO bracket with two USB and one eSATA then we've got 1 two 3 4 5
six 7 eight SATA cables uh four our
right angle four our straight we've got the Rog connect USB cable then we've got
an IO Shield we've got some zip ties
we've got there oh this is good prob belt that's another feature it includes
so you've got little uh leads that you can plug into all of the voltage
monitoring points on the motherboard board to make it easier to plug in your
multimeter you've got their Q connector uh one crossfire bridge and then one
long SLI Bridge we've got some temperature sensors and last but not
least we have the Rampage Extreme users guide with some labels for the SATA
cables as well as uh the drivers and
installation utilities DVD don't use that download the latest off D website
then we have a republic of Gamers sticker so let's get all that back in
there and let's get the motherboard out so one thing that stands out to me
right away about this motherboard is while EVGA and uh Gigabyte are tripping
over themselves and each other to release motherboards that are not a
standard ATX form factor ASUS has opted
to stick with the ATX uh
design for this particular board you can see they've gone a little bit wider so
it's more like an extended ATX than a standard ATX but they keep the standard
Seven slots rather than making the board longer at the bottom and I really like
this for a number of reasons the first of all the first of which is that it
means it can fit in many more cases than these these non-standard boards it also
if they put the engineering work into it and you can see that they have they've
got the first PCI Express slot right at the top it means there's a lot of
components packed in there but even with this standard ATX board you still get
all the benefits of up to four-way Crossfire or four-way SLI these slots
will run at 8X 8X 8X 8X and if you have
a case like the Corsair obsidian 800d that doesn't have an eighth slot but
does have a vented port at the back you can actually install a dual slot card in
here so you'll go two two two and two so
you can use a standard ATX board to get that extreme feature as long as you put
the engineering work into it which isus has why don't we start with the c or
rather move on to the CPU socket so it's a standard 1366 socket there's not much
to say about it but they have included holes for 1366 as well as what appears
to be 775 so if you have an old cooler and a lot of the extreme overclocking
guys with their liquid nitrogen pots won't have newer hard mounting hardware
you can definitely use that to mount it there over here we have got two 8 Pin
CPU connectors so that means that this through its digital pwm is able to pump
a lot of juice into your processor you've got to be going pretty far over
stock speeds for that to be a benefit but hey that's what this board is for uh
we've got the clear seos buttton right here as well as one here so you've got
one on the top of the board if you're using it on an Open Bench as well as one
on the back panel very convenient thank you assus for that then we've got our
support for up to uh six dims so that's
triple Channel memory we have our onboard switches there's our start and
reset and then we have have oh boy okay
well I wish I knew what those do but uh please leave a comment if you know what
these do they are onoff switches right here they are labeled switch one to
switch four very cool okay oh this is interesting there's a liquid nitrogen
mode up here and it appears to be the jumper right here so they've actually
got a special liquid nitrogen profile for this board and I'm guessing what it
does is it controls the uh the timing of the electrical signals for if the board
is going to be really really cold okay here we've got our 24 pin connector in
its ideal location and then we move down and we see our SATA connector so we have
two SATA 6 gbit per second connectors here and rather yeah two SATA 6 gbit per
second and then six SATA 2 so SATA 3 GB
per second connectors here then we have the uh BIOS
switch right here we have one more SATA connector then we have our front panel
connectors here are the two BIOS chips
so all you have to do this is so cool is press the button and then you'll
actually load one BIOS profile or the other one here's the plugin for their OC
station which is a dual 5 and 1/4 in Bay device that you can plug into the front
of your case for some Hardware overclocking next we've got and I like
this this motherboard has all four pin pwm fan connectors no Legacy thre pin
fan connectors and it has a ton of them 1 two three let me see let's just keep
counting here I got four I've got five
six seven seven fan connectors so you can load a ton of fans on here that's
pretty cool next we have a Molex connector at the bottom so this is to
provide additional power there's actually two of them and I'm glad to see
this one in a very sensible location here because usually you see a lot of
bottom mounted power supplies these days and then there's one more up here so
that's going to give you additional juice for your graphics cards if you're running four high powered cards in here
let me see what else we've got there's your front panel audio connector as well
as your BIOS uh battery and last but not
least we've actually got one more clear seimos jumper so you can do it the
oldfashioned jumper way or you can hit either of the two switches up at the top
of the board now let's have a look at the cooling solution now the x58 chipset
as well as the ic10 r Southbridge they
don't really run that hot it's not really necessary to throw a whole ton of
cooling at them but if you yeah you know what that's basically
it if you want to ASUS has included an
extra heat sink which you can see straps in right where this this piece comes off
so you can leave it passive because you don't need all that cooling or you can
throw an additional one on here and you can get that addition additional cooling
if you want it if you're going to be pushing it even harder so that's uh you
know what the spacing actually looks right for Swift Tech's water block that
can mount here as well so it looks like Aus has continued their tradition with
their high-end Republic of Gamers Boards of allowing them to be water cooled with
a third party piece that's pretty neat as well and the cameraman is probably
having a look at the like black angular heat sink I really like their new style
and their Republic of Gamers boards have been typically black and red they've
done an exceptional job of making this board look like something you'd really
want to put on display in a windowed case so why don't we have a look at the
oh yeah let's have a look at the back of the board look at that so they've got the standard back plate for the CPU
socket but they've also got uh a cooling heat spreader for the back of the pwm so
that's something you see on the back of boards from time to time but not really
all that often last but not least let's
have a look at the I/O connectivity at the back so we got a PS2 keyboard Port
we've got 1 2 3 4 5 six USB 2.0 ports
this is not a true USB port that is the Rog connect Port so that can be used to
flash the BIOS in that Innovative new way you plug in the USB with the BIOS on
it you hold this for 2 seconds and it flashes awesome next we have a clear
Simo switch here Optical audio out eat
fire wire gigabit Ethernet this is you know what this is one of those things
again I have to comment on I'm so sick of seeing gaming motherboards with like
two or I've seen up to four Ethernet connections on the back why Gamers need
one fast Ethernet connection that's all so that's uh yeah just random rant then
we have two USB 3.0 ports as well as 7.1
audio thank you for checking out my unboxing and product overview of the
much awaited ASUS Rampage 3
extremee