ASUS Rampage III Formula LGA 1366 Intel X58 USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard

Pros: It's another high-quality product from ASUS. I buy ASUS motherboards because in building dozens of computers from myself, friends, and family, I've had not one faulty board. When it comes to a motherboard, it's the last thing that you want to fail. Tearing a system apart piece by piece in order to liberate a faulty motherboard is pure torture. ASUS has never put me through that.

The BIOS has a very satisfying set of features and is easy to navigate. The board layout is logical and, for the most part, easy to work on and around. I got exactly what I expected. I don't like surprises.

Cons: Marvell and their on-board SATA III controller. Clue: Don't provide a controller that's advertised as 6g and RAID, if it can't deliver. The 9128 controller is incapable of handling two SATA III SSDs in RAID0 with any consistency. If that's what you're looking at doing, save yourself some late nights and lost sleep and wait... better will be coming.

In addition, Trim commands from the OS don't get passed to the SSDs through the controller, either with the current Marvell Drivers or the MS drivers. You'll need an excellent SSD with good built-in garbage collection capabilities to run on the Marvell chip. You'll have to make sure that you idle the system (Does Windows 7 every truly idle?), even better yet, boot into BIOS and leave it running at the BIOS screen for a night every once in a while, in order for the SSDs to sense that they're idle and run their own garbage collection algorithms.

No eggs docked for the Marvell madness. I knew what I was getting into.

Overall Review: With SATA III SSDs in RAID0, the throughput at times is too great for the Marvell chip to handle, and a drive drops out of the array. That means that, essentially, you've lost the whole virtual drive. Whatever data you were compiling is gone, and you will have to reboot the system to get the drive array functioning again. If you haven't saved your work, you will be one irritated peep. I was able to get RAID0 working on the 9128 with 2 SSDs quite easily. It was generally stable enough to load the OS and boot the OS. Any high throughput activity, a backup being an excellent example (from outside or inside of the OS), caused a member to drop from the array. Microsoft Backup worked, surprisingly. Luckily, this and other tests reproduced the issue before I went into hours of configuration of the OS and applications, and I bailed on the idea of two SATA III SSDs in RAID0. One is plenty fast enough for me anyway.

Pros: The layout of this Motherboard is excellent; so are the features. If you're not planning to install 4 video cards this is a fine choice if you are going with an Intel i7 1336 socket CPU.
However, be aware of the Marvell 9128 SATA 3 controller short Cummings.

Cons: Although I have approximately $2,400 invested in my new build, I could not get my Kingston HyperX 120 SSD to meet the performance advertised. Using ATTO (Windows Disk Benchmark) I should be able to attain a max read rate of 525 megabytes and a write rate close to 500 megabytes. I have not been able to get more then 400 read and 240 write. I know others that have the same Kingston HyperX SSD drive installed and have no problem attaining the advertised speed using ATTO. I have done a number of PC builds over the years and I am very disappointed. I have used ASUS products often and this is the first time I've had any problems with a new build. I am very methodical when I do a build and make sure all my hardware and software is current. This includes firmware, BIOS and drivers.
I corresponded with ASUS and they gave me two totally unacceptable answers;
1 - The Marvell SATA 3 ports are only for 'data', not the OS!
2 - Check the motherboard specifications... Duh!
I finally got to speak

Overall Review: Other Considerations:
During my research into to the SSD performance problem I uncovered the following:
Intel is not going to support their X58 chipset any longer. The Intel X58 chipset does not support SATA 3 (6gb).
Intel will eventually release their X79 chipset that will provide native support for SATA 3 and USB 3.
The SSD performance shortfall is not a problem with the Kingston HyperX SSD. The problem is with the Marvell 9128 controller on the ASUS motherboard. And, there is no Marvell firmware or driver update for the ASUS Rampage III Formula motherboard.
Conclusion:
I would like to return this ASUS Rampage III Formula motherboard and get a new motherboard that will meet the SATA 3 (6gb) specifications as advertised. I don't consider this a Newegg problem. And, it doesn't appear ASUS will do anything to keep me as a customer.