So today we're going to be having a look at the Rampage 3 formula motherboard
this is from ausa's Republic of Gamers line but you can tell from the suffix
formula that it's actually a value member of the Republic of Gamers line
which may seem like a it's a little bit counterintuitive but it is so the
Rampage 3 Extreme is the fully featured board and the Rampage 3 formula is kind
of like a little brother so this is a core i7 motherboard that means it has
supp for all the latest LGA 1366 CPUs
that means you got support for six cores quad cores and that's pretty much all
you have on 1366 because it is an Enthusiast platform core i7 extreme core
i7 you've got support for SLI as well as hi Crossfire X so let's have a look at
the Box itself you can see a handy little window where you've got three PCI
Express 16x slots but we'll talk more about the board in a minute let's talk
about a couple of the key features so you've got Rog connect which is a USB
interface for plugging in an a different computer to actually uh control BIOS
options on this particular board You've Got Game first technology which is a lan
feature that it has in order to give you the the speed you need to pone awesome I
love it as well as to uh give your games priority access to any land functions
you've got BIOS flashback so you have two BIOS ROMs which you can actually
choose which one you want to boot from as well as Supreme FX x52 builtin so
that's a creative uh solution for your on onboard sound Extreme Engine Digi
plus is a powerful combination of analog and digital design elements as well as
an included copy of casers skki antivirus on the back in typical Rog
fashion it has exactly the same stuff except for uh oh it also mentions
three-way SLI and Crossfire X so that's uh that's a good thing I suppose it has
one additional feature listed on the back that is not already listed on the
front so let's have a look at the accessory package which as you might
expect with an Rog board is quite complete you got a three-way SLI Bridge
you have an IO shield with their uh spongy backing on it you also have some
zip ties for cable management you have a crossfire Bridge a nice long flexible
SLI Bridge you've got your Q connectors for easy plugging in of the front USB as
well as the front panel connectors a users guide
including a republic of gamer sticker as
well as a support DVD which you should throw away and download the latest from
the ASUS website you have an optional fan as well as an installation guide for
it so that's only if you're using water cooling or a passive or very low air
flow cooler you've got an EA bracket as well as USB 2.0 there's your cable for
Rog connect which is a standard USB a TOA male to male cable then you've
got six SATA 2 cables two SATA 3 cables
please note that those are identical other than the color there is no
physical difference between a satat 2 cable and a SATA 3 cable in terms of
data transmission I mean I guess if you had a
really terrible quality SATA 2 cable it might not work at sat 3 speeds but I
mean I really find that quite quite far-fetched indeed all right so let's
get the motherboard out itself and have a look at it as always ASUS has just
nailed the aesthetic on this particular board their Republic of Gamers boards
have really been outstanding lately in that regard so we've got a black PCB
with black uh nickel plated as well as red accents it looks just phenomenal so
let's have a look at the overall layout cameraman's very interested in the pwm
cooling here so you can see that that is connected via a couple of different heat
pipes so the top one over here is connected via heat pipe to the bottom
one so you can see those two are sharing their load a little bit and then you
have a heat pipe connecting the uh the left pwm cooler to the North Bridge
cooler down to oh that's a separate heat pipe itself no no it's not that's the
same heat pipe it's flattened out and then it curves up and that connects the
South Bridge as well so let's look at the overall board layout we'll start
with the CPU socket so cameraman if you can come direct your attention over here
that is an LGA 1366 socket I already mentioned the CPU support but I will say
it again core i7 as well as core i7 extreme you've got your 8 Pin power
connector with the optional four pin uh cover placed on it by default up here in
the top left corner in its ideal location you've got your six RAM slots
supporting dual dual Channel you're supporting dual sets of triple Channel
DDR3 memory with the quick install
memory dim slot so you can see that there are only Clips on the one side the
other side has no clips so you're meant to insert the module this way and then
clip it down on the one side your 24 pin connector is in its ideal location along
the right hand edge of the board and you've also got start
reset and all of your uh voltage
measurement options along the top right right hand side of the board as well in
very very conveniently located fashion
so down here we have the Go Button we have oh q q reset up here I had actually
missed that button and then moving down the board oh cameraman still looking at
all the buttons oh he's waiting for it to focus I see what he's doing now okay
so let's move down and have a look at the SATA options so we've got six SATA
two ports remember Intel still does not have support natively for sative three
on their chipset so it's actually a Marvel chipset right there that is
running the SATA 3 6 GB per second Port so you do have two of those moving down
the board we have a BIOS reset switch right here although that's far less
conveniently located than the one that I already saw on the back panel here's
your front panel connectors as well as you another fan connector you've got
your dual BIOS chips right there so it's actually got two physical chips this is
not some cheap hack two physical BIOS chips that you can switch in between
you've got your front USB ports here as well as some more of them over here I'm
not sure which of these are USB and which are not to be perfectly honest all
right we've got two more fan connectors I'm going to do a quick count of the fan
connectors before we're done here fire wire port and then let's look at the PCI
Express layout so uh yeah there's the x52 Supreme effect cameraman's making
his way to the PCI Express slots we start with a PCIe 1x slot up at the top
here and then we have a PCIe 16x slot
now please note there is an absence of a slot here the assumption is that if
you're buying a republic of Gamers board and this is a good assumption that
you're probably using a dual slot graphics card which you should be so you
don't need a slot here basically all right then we've got another PCI Express
16x slot a PCI e1x 16x and a PCI slot so
if you're running dual card SLI or Crossfire you're going to use these two
which means you're going to cover this one your blank you're going to cover this one in a PCI slot that will leave
you with two PCIe 1X slots that will remain usable we've got an auxiliary
Molex power connector here so if you are running up to three cards and then
you'll cover almost all of your slots except this guy then you should plug
that in because otherwise you're drawing just too much power out of the 24 pin
connector now let's have a look at the back of the board on the io Shield we've
got a purple PS2 Port so that's going to be keyboard only then we've got 1 2 3 4
5 six oh is that one of those combo
ports no it's not so we have six USB 2.0
ports we have a powered Esa Port as well as a regular eatle port and then we have
a clear seimo switch optical audio out the Rog connect button USB 3.0 support
gigabit land and those look like goldplated 7.1 audio connectors and
before we're done I did promise a count of the four pin fan connector so we have
one two up here by the CPU socket we have another one over here on the top
right of the board we have another one down here by the North Bridge so that is
I don't know four and then down at the bottom of the board we find another five
six seven totals so that means that you can actually control all of those fans
via the BIOS and uh hold on 1 2 3 4 5 6
7 eight eight there's one more over here by the 24 pin connector so you can
actually control eight fans via the bio
software and you can optimize them for performance or for silence that's a
pretty cool feature and they all support pwm there's the back of the board in
case you care thank you for checking out my unboxing of the Rampage 3 formula
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