| Saturday, January 9th 2010 |
One of ASUS' premier offers for this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) event is a new high-end socket LGA-1366 motherboard, the Republic of Gamers (ROG) Rampage III Extreme. The board succeeds the Rampage II Extreme which launched over an year ago along with Intel's then new Core i7 series processors. The new model based on the Intel X58 Express + ICH10R chipset, comes with four well spaced out PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slots, a new set of overclocking enhancements such as the ROG connect which lets you control the motherboard's overclocking from any Bluetooth and Java enabled mobile phone, SATA 6 Gb/s and USB 3.0 connectivity using ASUS' innovative PCI-Express 2.0 bridge implementation, and a more powerful CPU VRM to keep the board stable with bleeding-edge settings.
The board features an enhanced CPU VRM which is now powered by two 8-pin ATX connectors apart from two 4-pin Molex connectors. Some of these could be redundant and needed only for electrical stability. The CPU and memory power circuitry makes use of super-ML capacitors for cleaner power delivery. Voltage readouts are located next to the DIMM slots for accessibility. The motherboard makes use of slimmer component heatsinks that look to be made of the ceramic composite which the TUF Sabertooth P55 motherboard uses.
Expansion slots include four PCI-Express 2.0 x16 (electrical x16, NC, x16, NC; or x8, x8, x8, x8) depending on how they are populated, and one each of PCI-Express 2.0 x4 and PCI. A PLX ExpressLane PEX 8613 bridge chip is used to give out up to 12 PCI-Express 2.0 lanes (using three ports) connecting to the southbridge using its PCI-Express 1.1 x4 link, so that any PCI-E 2.0 device can make use of that amount of bandwidth. Devices connected to it include a Marvell 2-port SATA 6 Gb/s controller, and an NEC 2-port USB 3.0 controller. Connectivity includes 8-channel audio with optical SPDIF output, gigabit Ethernet, Bluetooth, eSATA, USB 2.0 and 3.0. The Rampage III Extreme should come out in Q1, just in time for Intel's 32 nm Core i7 980X six-core processor based on the Westmere architecture.
Source: Tom's Hardware
The board features an enhanced CPU VRM which is now powered by two 8-pin ATX connectors apart from two 4-pin Molex connectors. Some of these could be redundant and needed only for electrical stability. The CPU and memory power circuitry makes use of super-ML capacitors for cleaner power delivery. Voltage readouts are located next to the DIMM slots for accessibility. The motherboard makes use of slimmer component heatsinks that look to be made of the ceramic composite which the TUF Sabertooth P55 motherboard uses.
Expansion slots include four PCI-Express 2.0 x16 (electrical x16, NC, x16, NC; or x8, x8, x8, x8) depending on how they are populated, and one each of PCI-Express 2.0 x4 and PCI. A PLX ExpressLane PEX 8613 bridge chip is used to give out up to 12 PCI-Express 2.0 lanes (using three ports) connecting to the southbridge using its PCI-Express 1.1 x4 link, so that any PCI-E 2.0 device can make use of that amount of bandwidth. Devices connected to it include a Marvell 2-port SATA 6 Gb/s controller, and an NEC 2-port USB 3.0 controller. Connectivity includes 8-channel audio with optical SPDIF output, gigabit Ethernet, Bluetooth, eSATA, USB 2.0 and 3.0. The Rampage III Extreme should come out in Q1, just in time for Intel's 32 nm Core i7 980X six-core processor based on the Westmere architecture.
Source: Tom's Hardware
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