Roughly two weeks ago at CeBIT ASUS showed off an all new Rampage III BLACK EDITION motherboard. We just received a unit for review and I could not leave you guys hangin in there without showing some photo's.

The R3E Black Edition comes with an X58 chipset and the main novelty is ThunderBolt, a new expansion card from ASUS that integrates Xonar sound as well as BigFoot's Killer NPU. Basically, this means that the board 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 all the other high-end features you'd expect on a ROG board.

The Rampage III Extreme Black Edition has the same core specs as its predecessor. However, it introduces a new ROG Thunderbolt expansion card. According to Asus, the audio provided by Xonar gives sound quality that is four times better than a regular sound card. On the other hand, the networking portion of the card optimizes the gaming traffic more efficiently than the standard Windows network stack. The design of the heatsinks and VRMs are also redesigned