The Rampage 3 Gene is basically like the Rampage 3 Extreme but in a microATX form
factor. Okay, that's it. I'm done the video. I'm just going to knock off for
lunch. So, thanks for watching and don't forget to
subscribe to Linus Tech. No, I'm just kidding. Okay, so the Rampage 3 Gene,
this is an LG 1366 motherboard. It
supports Core i7 Extreme, Core i7 processors on LGA 1366. It's SLI and
Crossfire X ready. It's Windows 7 ready. It has a bunch of ASUS Republic of
Gamers features, including ROG Connect, so that means you can hook it up to
another PC, uh, tweak a bunch of hardware settings that way. It has
ProBuilt, uh, which is your voltage readout points. It has CPU level up,
which is a onebutton overclocking method, which you probably aren't going
to be using if you're buying a Rampage board. It has a game first, which is a
LAN priority um,
excuse me, LAN priority application. So you can actually set it so that your
incoming and outgoing packets are prioritized to either games, media
streaming, VIP or file sharing. And you've got nice high-end onboard audio.
It includes this Kasperski antivirus apparently as well. So let's have a look
at the included bundle accessories first
and then we will have a look at the board. I really like the look of ASUS's
Rampage series boards these days. They look just amazing. Okay, so the first
thing we've got is an IO shield. Next, we have some cable ties for
managing your wires. We've got an SLI bridge. They're front panel connector uh
software software helper blocks. So, these enable you to connect all your
front panels um buttons to this and then plug the whole thing into the board.
You've got a USB cable for the ROG connect. You've got one, two, three.
Actually, I'm sorry. There are two SATA 6 Gbit per second cables and then six
SATA 3 GB per second cables. Then we
have the users guide which includes a driver DVD as uh don't use this as well
as a Republic of Gamers sticker and some labels for your SATA cable so that you
can uh see which one goes to which drive very easily. They have one of these side
window case sticker things. I don't think I've ever seen anyone put one of
those on the side of their case before, but there's a first time for everything.
If you have one of those on the side of your case, please take a video of your computer and set it as a video response
to this video. I'm sure that everyone would be interested to see what your
case looks like with that thing on it.
All right, here we go. So, let's start in the middle. We've got our LG 1366
socket with what appears to be eightphase power. So, that means I mean
that's about as good as it gets for a microATX form factor. you have a lot
less PCB to work with. And given that we're seeing so many manufacturers
moving towards larger than ATX size boards, you can imagine there's a lot of
electrical routing that needs to go on with these high-end board designs these
days. We've got six DDR3 slots, and you
can see that it's got the clips on the one side and no clips on the other side.
So, these are those easy insert style slots. They support triple channel
memory. Here is the onboard battery for the uh SIMOS. Okay, that stores all of
your BIOS settings. So, you take that out, it'll lose the BIOS settings. You got your 24 pin power in its ideal
location on the right hand edge. And then you've got an 8 pin power in its
ideal location up at the top left. You only have to plug in four, but I would
recommend using eight, especially if you're running any overclocks. Next,
you've got two SATA 6 GB per second ports as well as six SATA 2 3 Gbit per
second ports. Here is the IROG. That's
their uh their chip for all of the Republic of Gamers overclocking
features. Here's your south bridge. So, that's covered by a very uh cool looking
heat sink. And then the north bridge is also covered by a similarly styled heat
sink. I really like what ASUS is doing with their heatsink designs where they're going after practicality in
terms of uh putting fins and heat pipes and everything on them, but they also
have a very uh very different angular look to them these days. I really think
it looks pretty cool. And this is probably a more practical design right
here, just the straight fins with a heat pipe through it. but that's going to be
doing a lot of the cooling not only for the voltage del um for the power
delivery for the CPU but also for the north bridge because they are connected
by that heat pipe. Down at the bottom of the board, we have one PCI slot, which
is probably one too many for a board like this, but lots of people still do
have some PCI peripherals that they need to plug in. We've also got two PCIe 16X
slots. These will run at full 16x and then we have one PCIe 4X slots. So, if
you're using two dual slot graphics cards, you will not be able to install
any additional cards in this motherboard. It's just a limitation of
microATX. We've got onboard start and reset buttons as well as a couple of USB
2.0 front panel headers as well as a FireWire front panel header.
Moving around to here, we have the back
panel connection. So, we have our PS2 keyboard port. We have 1 2 3 4 5 six USB
2.0 ports. a SIMOS clear button in its absolutely ideal, my favoriteest place.
On the back panel of the motherboard, we have optical audio out, FireWire,
gigabit Ethernet, ROG connect button and port, two USB 3.0 ports, and what appear
to be goldplated 7.1 audio ports. Thank you for checking out my unboxing and
first look at the ASUS Rampage 3
Extreme.