ASUS Rampage III Extreme Black Edition Gaming Motherboard Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
2,509 words · ~12 min read
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by popular demand I can't believe how many people have asked me to unbox this
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the ASUS Rampage 3 Black Edition
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motherboard so this is part of their Republic of Gamers brand this is an x58
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that is an LGA 1366 motherboard it supports cor i7 extremes core i7s NVIDIA
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SLI and ATI Crossfire I think they mean AMD Crossfire but the badge has yet to
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be updated uh let's go around to the back where we will find a couple of
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things first there is an Rog Thunderbolt
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so that appears to be I don't know something looks like a sound card so
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we'll get a little bit into that looks like it has external power so that's got to have a headphone amp on it we've got
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Bluetooth v3.0 okay we've got Rog connect which is
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their um uh their overclocking feature
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which allows you to use another computer to plug into here and then alter
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overclocking settings as well as Extreme Engine Digi plus which is their vrm
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solution all right everything else on here on the back is pretty straightforward so why don't we go ahead
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and have a look at what is presumably a window into the future of
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motherboards there's the Thunderbolt look at that powered by oxnar I mean
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Zonar sorry sorry um so we'll we'll look at that more later but let's have a look
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at what's in here so first of all we have a built-in headphone amp aha sound
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greater yeah it will sound greater with a headphone amp guarantee uh what what
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else do we have here okay so that looks like some sort of processing chip okay
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that's good we have a dedicated npu so that's a killer
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e2100 dedicate really is that a full
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e2100 wow cool okay so there you go you
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got a PCI e1x uh killer killer Nick all
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right Extreme Engine Digi plus okay analog and digital design elements
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combined for power okay Rog connect
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we've already covered that Bluetooth v3.0 sers and Wi-Fi enjoyment new
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technology lifestyle excellent kasperski antivirus
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and that's pretty much it so let's start opening this thing up I'm actually
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excited about this because I did not even know that this product existed
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until I had like 300 billion requests to
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unbox it uh all over my Channel all over
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my inbox I even had some guy email me
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and it's like okay don't know how you got my email but like thank you for
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requesting an unboxing in it I'll see what I can do okay here we are
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lots of accessories look at this so we have a couple of Wi-Fi antennas I
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remember these I had one of these with my a832 SLI Deluxe I think that's around
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the time they started shipping these uh these Wi-Fi antennas with onboard Wi-Fi
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on their motherboards and they stopped doing it for a while all right we've got
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a USB uh USB 2.0 and ESAT PCI bracket got
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a little chipset fan which Probably sounds horrible don't recommend using
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that in all like likelihood okay we've got an extension cable for
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USB okay oh or or onboard uh or front
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panel audio maybe I don't know I don't know what this is for okay next we've
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got uh some SATA 3 cables which are exactly the same as the six SATA 2 CA so
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that's uh two SATA 3 6 SATA 2 cables except for the color okay we've got the
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Rog connect USB cable so why don't me
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throw all these back in here there we are we've got a two-way SLI
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Bridge we have a two-way SLI Bridge we
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have a crossfire Bridge okay we have their Q connector which is uh for the
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front panel connectors as well as one USB 2.0 header make it a little easier
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to plug in we've got some zip ties we have an IO Shield some temperature
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probes a user guide Rampage 3 black
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that's a heavy user guy that's like thick look at that okay and then we have
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a uh an Intel chipset and support DVD as well as a republic of
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Gamers sticker throw away the DVD there oo look
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at this audio Precision test report
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Thunderbolt powered by Zonar so what's this disclaimer the
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information and contents contained in the something something okay so
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basically they're just showing it's really good cool thanks guys okay then
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we got a big old case sticker and let's go ahead and uh
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put that back too all right motherboard
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time okay Thunderbolt why don't we do
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the Thunderbolt a little bit later actually give me two seconds here guys
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all right so we're going to have a look at the Thunderbolt powered by Zonar
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first so this is a PCI e1x combo card it includes not
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only the Lan Port but also the Zonar
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aspects which are the sound aspects of the very high-end Lan and sound solution
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that comes with this board so you've got a SPI if out you've also got a line out
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and a line in okay moving around we've got a matte
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black PCB and you can see right on the back here you've got Rampage 3 Black
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Edition as well as your serial number information all on there okay we've also
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got front audio out which is right here
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and at the back of the card we've got a USB connection which is evidently what
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that little USB extension cable was for and then we've also got a Molex power
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connector so that is going to provide power to the
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Amplified audio
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outport all right let's have a look at the motherboard itself so the first
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thing I noticed about it three guesses guys matte black PCB love it anything
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with a matte black PCB could be in my system no problem because matte black
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pcbs look awesome next thing I noticed about this board is it has a
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non-standard layout it is slightly wider than an ATX spec an ATX board would
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normally end right about here okay this one is just a little bit wide so you
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don't need additional mounting holes you don't need an eatx case but you will
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need um a a little bit more width on the
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edge of your motherboard tray in order to install this board so you can see it's only 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 in L in in
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length or in height so it's a standard ATX height but it's a little bit bit
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wide all right so let's start at the CPU socket right in the middle cuz that's a
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good place to start as I mentioned before that is an LGA 1366 socket so
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that has full support for all the core i7 extremes core i7s on the LGA
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1366 platform here we've got the pwm
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which includes a very very slick looking cooler
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okay so here you go there's some kind of
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NEC SL token talken token however you
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pronounce that chip here as well as eight phases of their Digi plus
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pwm actually hold on bear with me a moment yes 8 plus three phase power so
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what that means is we've got eight higher quality phases as opposed to uh
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putting a ton of lower quality phases on this particular motherboard that is the
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route ASUS has decided to go moving over here we've got support for
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triple Channel memory up to six dims so it uses ASUS's um easy slots so that
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means you only have to actually fasten the clip on the one side you just slide
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it in the one side put it in and then you push the clip in like this we've got
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a post LED indicator so that'll give you post codes right there we have start and
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reset switches on board we've also got voltage checkpoints all down here so
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we've got a couple grounds uh we've got
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CPU CPU PLL qpi ioh ioh PCIe I I PCIe and RAM so
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that's actually More Voltage checkpoints than I've seen on I think any other
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board here are the PCI e6x switches so
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you can actually use these to easily diagnose video cards this is this
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feature there have been times when I would have pretty much done anything for
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this feature because when you install don't turn the camera sideways
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like that when you install a couple of video cards and they're you know they
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got full cover liquid cooling blocks on them and you're trying to figure out
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okay you have a video problem is the is the bottom C dead the easiest way to
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find out would be to go like this turn off your top slot boom all of a sudden
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that's your primary PCI E slot now you can find out if that card's dead or if
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it's something else that's wrong with your system so it's great for uh for
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troubleshooting they've also got um this button which is for making sure that the
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system will post 100% no problem uh with
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the any memory no matter what the spec is 24 pin power here we've got also a
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USB 3.0 front panel header so you can use that on any new
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case that supports a USB 3.0 uh USB 3.0 front ports via a header
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we've also got storage here so we've got six SATA 2 3 GB per second as well as
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two SATA 3 6 gbit per second ports we've
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got a pretty sweet looking Southbridge heat sink which has a Seuss branding on
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it it's got kind of a matte black finish the entire board almost is black other
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than a couple little red accents which look really good dual BIOS right here
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you can see we've got two dedicated BIOS chips couple front USB ports oh yeah
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front panel switches as well as a BIOS clear switch right here there's a ton of
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four pin pwm fan connectors I'll count them in a minute but there's just seems
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to be a ton on this board we've got a Molex uh easy plug here so that's if
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you're loading this up with graphics cards you might need to provide some auxiliary power to prevent your 24 pin
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connector from burning out from providing all that juice all through the
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board okay we've got a front audio connector on the motherboard itself as
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well using x52 Supreme FX so if you
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don't want to use the Thunderbolt card you still have pretty decent onboard
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audio which is kind of cool okay so that's your that's that you
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also have pretty decent onboard Ethernet so they're using the Intel Ethernet as
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opposed to a third party chip for the onboard Ethernet as well if you don't
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want to use the killer e2100 that comes on the Thunderbolt card so let's have a
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look at what we've got oh yeah I promised to count the four pin pwm fan
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connectors oh one more other thing that I haven't shown yet to is it has two
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PCIe 8 Pin connectors or PCIe two CPU
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EPS 8 Pin connectors up here so you're going to need to access those from the
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top probably one of them is optional uh but providing both will give you
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potential more current to the CPU socket we got 1 2 3 4 H just zoom out so you
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can see where these are four uh five 6 7
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eight eight four pin pwm fan connectors
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all over this motherboard craziness oh yeah here's where that fan goes on the
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North Bridge heat sink so that's where I mentioned there was a red accent there
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so you can bolt that fan on there and get a little bit of additional cooling
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if you are using water cooling or some other kind of uh cooling that doesn't
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provide any incid Dental air flow to the Northbridge heat sink all right so let's
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have a look at the back where we will find our Bluetooth 3.0 as well as
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Wireless Len 80211 BGN there's also
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another reset switch up here that's a very peculiar place for it all right and
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an additional one here you be kidding me oh yeah okay
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there's a clear seimos switch there okay we've got one of those PS2 mouse
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keyboard combo ports we have 1 2 3 4 5
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six USB 2.0 ports here on the back we have two USB 3.0 ports two EA ports we
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have our rogg connect button as well as the USB port for that the Intel land
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that I mentioned before as well as the creative x52 Supreme FX sound that I
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mentioned before so this is a Decked Out
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motherboard there is no doubt about it we've also got some additional heat
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Sinker going on on the back here for the pwm as well as the standard LGA 1366
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back plate all of the heat sinks on the front are attached via screws which is
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nice because they can't come out like push pins also means if you need to take
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them off and put them back on you don't risk damaging the push pins making it
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impossible thank you for checking out my unboxing of the Rampage 3 Black Edition
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from theeus don't forget to subscribe to Lion's techtips for more unboxings
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reviews and other computer videos so I did have to RTM for a couple of these
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things uh first of all there is an ln2 mode jumper over here and that along
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with the Q reset button over here which actually stops power to the CPU to allow
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you to recover from a non-posting state
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when you are using liquid nitrogen is uh some of the extreme overclocking
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features that we have on this here particular board there's also a jumper
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for a load line calibration on the qpi
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okay we also have uh whoops we also clarified what this guy down here does
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this is a bio switch so you can actually switch uh between these two BIOS chips here on
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the board and I think that's pretty much all that we wanted to cover here