Manufacturer: Asus Price: $ 560 US Author: Steve Date: 07/12/2011

[ Introduction ]

Today we are checking out one of the most expensive desktop motherboards money can buy, as we give the Asus flagship X58 motherboard the once over. Known as the Rampage III Black Edition, this enthusiast type motherboard has it all from high-end discrete audio to unbeatable network performance... Some three months ago now we checked out the new G1.Sniper motherboard, which was part of the elite Gigabyte G1.Killer series. Although the G1.Sniper was not the most expensive motherboard in the G1.Killer series, it still carried a hefty price tag of $450 US at the time (now $420 US). Yet despite that we actually found the Gigabyte G1.Sniper to be relatively good value given the included features. That review was concluded with this statement… “They have done a phenomenal job with the layout and appearance of the G1.Sniper, making it the best gaming orientated motherboard we have seen to date.” Since then we have been searching for an even better Intel X58 motherboard, with little success. However we soon stumbled upon the Asus Rampage III Black Edition, a motherboard that looked to surpass the G1.Sniper in terms of features. The Rampage III Black Edition is said to take overclocking to the next level and it does so with a fancy new black BIOS. The specifications list includes some pretty impressive memory support, not only can the board be crammed with 48GB of RAM, but it can also be clocked at 2.2GHz and in triple-channel that’s a lot of bandwidth. Although there is a SupremeFX X-Fi 2 8-Channel HD Audio Codec onboard offering features such as X-Fi Xtreme Fidelity, EAX Advanced HD 5.0, THX TruStudio PRO and Creative ALchemy, you can forget all that as Asus has included an add-in card called ROG ThunderBolt. This is essentially an Asus Xonar sound card with a Bigfoot Killer E2100 dedicated network processing unit (NPU) included. Of course there is a whole host of other features included as well, which we will get to shortly. Yet before we do there is probably one teeny tiny thing I should mention... the price, and if I am honest it’s not that tiny. Brace yourself... the Rampage III Black Edition is currently retailing for $560 US, making it 33% more expensive than the G1.Sniper and 19% more expensive than the G1.Assassin.

Table of Contents >>> Introduction <<< Multi-GPU support and ThunderBolt Wireless, Bluetooth, SATA, USB and the rest... Design & Layout BIOS & Overclocking Memory Bandwidth Performance Synthetic Performance Application Performance Encoding Performance Gaming Performance Power Consumption Conclusion Next Page ->

ProX	Posted on: 07/14/2011 10:46 PM What an incredible motherboard. It costs over $600 here which is a bit rich for me but I enjoyed looking at all the pictures

ftp	Posted on: 07/15/2011 12:17 PM The thunder card sucks they should have made all the devices onboard for sure. Shame it would have been an awesome board otherwise

Bluescreendeath

Posted on: 07/15/2011 11:05 PM This plus a pair of 6990's equals heaven as far as I am concerned

Calle2003 Posts: 16 Joined: 2010-04-27

Posted on: 07/17/2011 10:56 AM You use Everest instead of Aida64 since X58 1366 is such an old platform? :P

Sarge

Posted on: 07/17/2011 12:36 PM This is a great motherboard, I own one and have had no issues with it. Very good review even if the conclusion was not that favorable.

Steven Walton Posts: 104 Joined: 2010-02-08

Posted on: 07/17/2011 11:56 PM Posted by Calle2003 on 07/17/2011 11:56 AM You use Everest instead of Aida64 since X58 1366 is such an old platform? :P Thanks for pointing out the typo.