ASUS Rampage III Gene review
Posted by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 10/18/2010 01:00 PM [ 0 comment(s) ]

Packaging -- we always show it so you guys know what to look for in the store. Well uh, do you guys still go to stores or just order online?

After unpacking you'll notice a well styled and designed motherboard that hints to the Rampage III Extreme design actually.
It is a nice looking motherboard with the passively cooled heatsinks. Nice black PCB with red ROG coloring scheme and the usual complementary products. Eye catching is the new passive cooling slash heatsink design.
ASUS always does its bundles well and as such you'll find one motherboard, a manual that explains every aspect of the board. Other than that you'll find a back I/O panel protector, SLI connector, various chassis stickers and also three S-ATA cables, one SATA 6G cable, RC connect USB cable and yes .. a manual + driver CD.

Make no mistake, despite its size the extra features make this an expensive motherboard alright. You can expect the Rampage III Gene to be found in the 265 USD / 210 EUR price range. The board has the classic Republic of Gamers design with the red themed color scheme and the always black PCB. But let's zoom in a little and focus on the back-panel connectors.

So from left to right that's a PS2 keyboard connector. Then I count a total of six USB ports and then two blue colored USB 3.0 ports, lacking is a eSATA port?, Firewire is present, one Gigabit Ethernet. Digital audio in the form of an optical TOSLINK connector, and then all the way to the right the analog audio connectors.
You can also spot a button for CMOS clear and the vertical USB port is actually intended for ROG Connect, but can also be used as regular USB port.
The ROG team this time went wild, releasing a motherboard with all the features that last-gen motherboards should have such as USB 3.0 connectivity, Bluetooth, eSATA connectors, SATA 6.0Gbps, and 7.1 channel audio, but the real x-factor of the Rampage IV Extreme can only be found when we look at its overclocking features. Head on over to the next page where we'll discuss the X79 chipset, the respective ASUS model. Then will throw a decent photo-shoot and a benchmark suite at the products and get an indication what performance is like with the Intel Core i7-3960X (Sandy Bridge-E) and X79 Platform.
ASUS Rampage III Black Edition review
ASUS are launching the ASUS Rampage III Black Edition and it just has to be the most exclusive X58 motherboard we have ever had our hands on. Improved overclockability, black design (including a black colored BIOS). The spec-sheet might read pretty similar to last year's Rampage III Extreme, but there have been a few tweaks alright. The board now sports a quartet of PCIe x16 slots capable of supporting three-way SLI or four-way CrossFireX, support for 24GB DDR3 at speeds of up to 2,200MHz and then the fun begins, USB 3.0, SATA 6G, a ThunderBolt add-on card that integrates Xonar sound as well as BigFoot's Killer NPU.
ASUS Rampage III Gene review
Within that motto ASUS has it's own Gene series within the motherboard line up. Now if you put that on the X58 platform, it's called Rampage by ASUS. And then when this apocalyptic group of minions and demons called 'Republic of Gamers' aka ROG gets their hands on a product like this, you can expect improvements and extra overclock features.
ASUS Rampage III Extreme review
We test the ASUS Rampage III Extreme motherboard. The X58 based Rampage III Extreme is unadulterated performance, quality, versatility, some recently introduced innovation and massive overclockability. Now with added SATA 6G and USB 3.0 controllers as well.
