ASUS Rampage III Gene Republic of Gamers mATX Core i7 Motherboard Unboxing and First Look
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,093 words · ~5 min read
0:00
The Rampage 3 Gene is basically like the Rampage 3 Extreme but in a microATX form
0:06
factor. Okay, that's it. I'm done the video. I'm just going to knock off for
0:10
lunch. So, thanks for watching and don't forget to
0:14
subscribe to Linus Tech. No, I'm just kidding. Okay, so the Rampage 3 Gene,
0:17
this is an LG 1366 motherboard. It
0:20
supports Core i7 Extreme, Core i7 processors on LGA 1366. It's SLI and
0:26
Crossfire X ready. It's Windows 7 ready. It has a bunch of ASUS Republic of
0:31
Gamers features, including ROG Connect, so that means you can hook it up to
0:35
another PC, uh, tweak a bunch of hardware settings that way. It has
0:38
ProBuilt, uh, which is your voltage readout points. It has CPU level up,
0:43
which is a onebutton overclocking method, which you probably aren't going
0:46
to be using if you're buying a Rampage board. It has a game first, which is a
0:50
LAN priority um,
0:55
excuse me, LAN priority application. So you can actually set it so that your
0:59
incoming and outgoing packets are prioritized to either games, media
1:03
streaming, VIP or file sharing. And you've got nice high-end onboard audio.
1:09
It includes this Kasperski antivirus apparently as well. So let's have a look
1:12
at the included bundle accessories first
1:16
and then we will have a look at the board. I really like the look of ASUS's
1:20
Rampage series boards these days. They look just amazing. Okay, so the first
1:24
thing we've got is an IO shield. Next, we have some cable ties for
1:28
managing your wires. We've got an SLI bridge. They're front panel connector uh
1:34
software software helper blocks. So, these enable you to connect all your
1:39
front panels um buttons to this and then plug the whole thing into the board.
1:43
You've got a USB cable for the ROG connect. You've got one, two, three.
1:48
Actually, I'm sorry. There are two SATA 6 Gbit per second cables and then six
1:53
SATA 3 GB per second cables. Then we
1:56
have the users guide which includes a driver DVD as uh don't use this as well
2:02
as a Republic of Gamers sticker and some labels for your SATA cable so that you
2:07
can uh see which one goes to which drive very easily. They have one of these side
2:12
window case sticker things. I don't think I've ever seen anyone put one of
2:15
those on the side of their case before, but there's a first time for everything.
2:19
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
2:25
to this video. I'm sure that everyone would be interested to see what your
2:28
case looks like with that thing on it.
2:31
All right, here we go. So, let's start in the middle. We've got our LG 1366
2:36
socket with what appears to be eightphase power. So, that means I mean
2:39
that's about as good as it gets for a microATX form factor. you have a lot
2:43
less PCB to work with. And given that we're seeing so many manufacturers
2:46
moving towards larger than ATX size boards, you can imagine there's a lot of
2:51
electrical routing that needs to go on with these high-end board designs these
2:54
days. We've got six DDR3 slots, and you
2:58
can see that it's got the clips on the one side and no clips on the other side.
3:01
So, these are those easy insert style slots. They support triple channel
3:05
memory. Here is the onboard battery for the uh SIMOS. Okay, that stores all of
3:10
your BIOS settings. So, you take that out, it'll lose the BIOS settings. You got your 24 pin power in its ideal
3:15
location on the right hand edge. And then you've got an 8 pin power in its
3:18
ideal location up at the top left. You only have to plug in four, but I would
3:22
recommend using eight, especially if you're running any overclocks. Next,
3:26
you've got two SATA 6 GB per second ports as well as six SATA 2 3 Gbit per
3:31
second ports. Here is the IROG. That's
3:35
their uh their chip for all of the Republic of Gamers overclocking
3:39
features. Here's your south bridge. So, that's covered by a very uh cool looking
3:43
heat sink. And then the north bridge is also covered by a similarly styled heat
3:48
sink. I really like what ASUS is doing with their heatsink designs where they're going after practicality in
3:53
terms of uh putting fins and heat pipes and everything on them, but they also
3:57
have a very uh very different angular look to them these days. I really think
4:01
it looks pretty cool. And this is probably a more practical design right
4:04
here, just the straight fins with a heat pipe through it. but that's going to be
4:08
doing a lot of the cooling not only for the voltage del um for the power
4:11
delivery for the CPU but also for the north bridge because they are connected
4:15
by that heat pipe. Down at the bottom of the board, we have one PCI slot, which
4:19
is probably one too many for a board like this, but lots of people still do
4:23
have some PCI peripherals that they need to plug in. We've also got two PCIe 16X
4:29
slots. These will run at full 16x and then we have one PCIe 4X slots. So, if
4:34
you're using two dual slot graphics cards, you will not be able to install
4:38
any additional cards in this motherboard. It's just a limitation of
4:41
microATX. We've got onboard start and reset buttons as well as a couple of USB
4:47
2.0 front panel headers as well as a FireWire front panel header.
4:52
Moving around to here, we have the back
4:56
panel connection. So, we have our PS2 keyboard port. We have 1 2 3 4 5 six USB
5:02
2.0 ports. a SIMOS clear button in its absolutely ideal, my favoriteest place.
5:07
On the back panel of the motherboard, we have optical audio out, FireWire,
5:11
gigabit Ethernet, ROG connect button and port, two USB 3.0 ports, and what appear
5:16
to be goldplated 7.1 audio ports. Thank you for checking out my unboxing and
5:21
first look at the ASUS Rampage 3
5:24
Extreme.