Today we're going to review the monster inspection of the Asus Rampage III Formula Motherboard from Asus's republic of gamers line, but you can tell from the suffix formula. That's a valuable member of their republic of gamers line; this may seem a little bit counterintuitive, but the Rampage 3 Extreme is the fully featured motherboard, and the Rampage 3 Formula is kind of like a little brother. Asus Rampage III Formula is a core i7 motherboard, which means it has support for all the latest LGA 1366 CPUs. That means you got support for six cores quad-core, And that's pretty much all. You have on 1366 because it is an enthusiast platform core i7 extreme core i7. You've got support for SLI as well as each crossfire X.

Let's talk about a few key features of the Asus Rampage III Formula Motherboard. ROG Connect is a USB interface for plugging in on a different computer to control BIOS options on this motherboard. You've got Game First technology, a LAN feature that gives you the speed you need to PWN. Awesome, I love it and giving your games priority access to any land functions. You've bought BIOS flashback, So you have two BIOS from which you can choose which one you want to boot and supremeFX X X-Fi 2 built-in. That creative solution for your onboard sound extreme engine DIGI+ is a powerful combination of analog and digital design elements.

So let's have a look at the accessory package as you might expect that the motherboard is quite complete. You got a 3-way SLI bridge and IO shield with their spongy backing on it. You also have some zip ties for cable management. You have a crossfire bridge, a nice long flexible SLI bridge, Q-connectors for easy plugging in of the front USB, as well as the front panel connectors. A user's guide including a Republic of gamers sticker and support DVD, which you should throw away and download the latest from the Asus website. You have an optional fan as well as an installation guide. Suppose you're using water cooling or a passive or a very low airflow cooler. You've got an eSATA bracket, USB 2.0, and OD Connect, a standard USB. Then you've got six SATA-2 cables and two SATA-3 cables. Please note that these are identical other than the color. There is no physical difference between a SATA-2 cable and a SATA-3 cable in terms of data transmission. I mean, I guess if you had a terrible quality SATA-2 cable. It might not work at SATA-3 speeds.

Let's get the motherboard out itself and have a look at it; as always, Asus has just nailed the aesthetic on this particular motherboard. Their Republic of gamers motherboards has been outstanding lately in that regard. So we've got a black PCB with black nickel-plated and red accents; it looks just phenomenal. So let's look at the overall layout and be interested in the PWM cooling system. You can see that it is connected via a couple of different heat pipes. A heat pipe connects the top one to the bottom one. You can see those two are sharing their load a little bit, and then you have a heat pipe connecting the left PWM cooler to the Northbridge cooler down.

Let's look at the overall motherboard layout. We'll start with the CPU socket, an LGA 1366 socket. I already mentioned the CPU support, but I will say it again core i7 and core i7 extreme. You've got your eight-pin power connector with the optional four-pin cover in the top left corner, and it's an ideal location. With the quickly installed DIMM slots, you've got your 6 Ram slots supporting dual sets of triple channel DDR3 memory. You can see that there are only clips on one side. The other side has no clips. On the right side of the RAM slot, your 24-pin ATX connector is here, and I think there is an ideal location. On the right-hand edge of the motherboard, the start, reset, and all of your voltage measurement options. The top right-hand side of the motherboard is also very conveniently located fashion, and we have the Go button down here. Let's move down and have a look at these data options. We've got 6 SATA-2 ports. Remember, Intel does not have native support for SATA-3 on their chipset. So it's a Marvell chipset beside the SATA ports running the SATA-3 6 gigabit per second port. You have two moving down the board, and we have a BIOS reset switch at the bottom right corner.

You've got dual BIOS chips in the bottom right of the motherboard. It's about physical chips; this is not some cheap hack to physical BIOS chips that you can switch between those BIOS. You've got your front USB ports right side of the BIOS chip and two more fan connectors. Let's look at the PCI Express layout. The X-Fi-2 supreme effects are making their way to the PCI Express slots. We start with a PCIe 1x slot up at the top, and then we have a PCIe 16x slot. Now please note there is an absence of a slot here. The assumption is that if you're buying a republic of gamers board, and this is a reasonable assumption that you're probably using a dual slot graphics card, you should not need a slot here. Then we've got another PCI Express 16x slot, a PCIe 1x 16x, and a PCI slot. If you're running dual card SLI or crossfire, you're going to use these two, which means you're going to cover this one your blank, you're going to cover this one in a PCI slot, that will leave you with two PCIe 1x slots that will remain usable. We've bought an auxiliary Molex power connector there. If you run three cards and cover almost all slots except this, you should plug in because you're drawing too much power out of the 24-pin connector.

Now, look at the back of the board on the IO shield. We've got a purple PS2 port that will be keyboard only. Then we have six USB 2.0 ports. We have a powered eSATA port and a regular eSATA port. Then we have a clear CMOS switch, optical audio out the rog connect button, and USB 3.0 support Gigabit LAN, which looks like gold-plated 7.1 audio connectors. You can control eight cooling system fans via the BIOS software and optimize them for performance or for silence; that's a pretty cool feature, and they all support PWM at the back of the board, in case you care.

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