ASUS Rampage III Black Edition review

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The motherboard piece by piece

 

ASUS Rampage III Black Edition

There is 6 x DIMM support with a maximum of 48 GB, DDR3 2200(O.C.)/2133(O.C.)/2000(O.C.)/1800(O.C.)/1600/1333/1066 Non-ECC, Un-buffered Memory. There is support straight from the BIOS and XMP profiles, and of course then higher with overclocks. All the way down we stumble into connectors, buttons and SATA ports. Let's focus in a little to the far right just under the DIMM slots, we spot the ASUS MemOK/GO button (if the system crashes, this will default the memory yet retain the overclock). We also spot a voltage monitoring point here as well as a start and reset button.

To your far right, a diagnostic POST aka debug led. Should your system halt during post, the code can be used to see where the error originates from, very handy.

 

ASUS Rampage III Black Edition

Overall board design is just great. Everything is positioned really well. Let's move onwards to the left side where we stumble into a bunch of SATA connectors, let's zoom in a little.

The motherboard features six right-angle SATA II (3Gb/s) ports which are supplied by the chipset and they support AHCI and RAID 0/1/5/10. In addition to the regular SATA II ports, colored in grey we see another two additional SATA 3 (6 GBit) ports, powered by a Marvell controller. Then a JMicron controller supplies 2 x eSATA backpanel connectors.

They support RAID 0/1 and JBOD. To achieve RAID, select AHCI in the BIOS then during boot access the Marvell controller where you can set RAID levels. Yet another JMicron controller brings support for two eSATA / USB combo ports on the I/O panel.

The little red button to the far left is in fact a BIOS flashback switch, the motherboard has two BIOSes, powered down you press the button and can switch to the alternating BIOS, a little LED will indicate which BIOS is active.

ASUS Rampage III Black Edition

Very eye catching is of course the overall design. We can see that a bit better on this photo where ASUS uses a dark/red heatsinks. Let's flip the motherboard around once again.

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