ASUS Rampage III Extreme LGA 1366 Intel X58 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard

Pros: The Motherboard itself is built of quality components. The board has a nice appearance to the color scheme for the HAF932 case.

Cons: The motherboard does not fully support 24GBS of DDR3 running at 1066.

Overall Review: I would not recommend this board for any novice users. This is an advanced board and will require a great deal of knowledge when unlocking the full potential of the board.

Pros: A plethora of BIOS options, Remote tweaking built-in ROG Connect and RC Bluetooth allowing O/C with PDA, or notebooks. USB BIOS Flashback. LN2 mode and a Q reset that addresses cold boot problems, Quality all over the board RDS MOSFETs and lower ESR solid capacitors. Eight phases on the CPU three phases for QPI/DRAM power three phases for PCH (x58) three phases for memory I can go on and on. Easily overclocked this board to 4GHZ using I7-930 and had it prime95 stable.

Cons: BIOS is a little premature but nothing that held back my goal which was to hit 4GHZ. The unusal 4 pin Molex connector locations for Multi GPU may cause a little issue with cable managment.

Overall Review: The board is up there in price but as the old saying goes you get what you pay for.

Pros: Excellent layout to accomadate my 2 eVGA 470 SC's, tons of BIOS tweaks and settings , so far I only bumped my Corsair Dominators to 1600mhz, didn't OC my i7 930 yet... Asus bundled the MB and extras very nice I was very impressed coming from eVGA MBs. Also now using my SSD (OCZ Agility 60GB) for my OS drive and my WD VR drive as my game drive. USB 3.0 and SATA 6.0 for future upgrades. Will push the system more this weekend.

Cons: None, just the price. I forgot to put in the Bluetooth adapter... : (

Overall Review: This is my first x58 board coming from a P55 i5 750. It was worth the upgrade. Also this is my "first" Asus board in awhile (back AMD K6/7/X2 days I owned nothing but Asus) I stuck with eVGA for about 5 years with Intel starting with Core 2 and now I think I'm back. The features on this board doesn't compair to any of eVGA's boards except for the SR2 maybe but that was not practical for what I was looking for. Will likely stick to my setup now for the time being untill next year when the hex-cores come out.

Pros: OC's like a dream. if the OC fails, it'll tell you what failed for a fast recovery / fix. i7 980x OC'd to 4.4ghz no problems, 12gb Corsair CMT12GX3M6A1866C9 OC'd to 2000mhz no problems.

Cons: would be nice had it come with pre-updated bios... but no worries it's easy to fix.

Overall Review: to those having your memory issues, temp issues and OC issues. YOU NEED TO UPDATE THE BIOS first of all! so far the latest bios is 0860 at the date of this post with a beta 9124 available. you can find this at xtremesystems forums due to ASUS's delayed posting of updated bios on their suport page. FOR THOSE WITH LARGE MEMORY ISSUES! you need to up your VTT voltages, if you're using all 6 dims, you need atleast 1.3-1.4v, sometimes upto 1.5v to get all to register. this is NOT the board's fault, it's simple physics... if you want more of one thing, you must use more of another. the VTT or "QPI" voltage is adjustable for a reason, with 6 sticks you're putting twice the load on your chipset, thus requiring more juice to supply to the memory dims for stability.

Pros: Very nice overclocking ability.

Cons: Still haven't gotten all 12gb of RAM to be recognised after 3 weeks of trying different settings in BIOS.

Overall Review: Make sure you check qualified vender list for memory before purchase!!!!!!!!

Pros: This board is decked out with quite a few features and it's very easy to get lost in the settings for this thing. -BIOS has an Auto Overclock feature. You can select "Auto" mode, i7-965 Extreme (3.33GHz) and i7-Crazy (3.7GHz). In testing I was able to get my i7-950 from 3.07GHz to 3.7GHz and it was stable. Make sure you have enough cooling though, this can be dangerously hot. -Motherboard has two CPU 8-pin power connections, which made boosting my overclock from the automatic 3.7 to 4.2 very stable and easy to do. -PCIe x16 slots 1 and 3 run at full x16 even in SLI. It's not often a board can do that these days. -I/O panel is flooded with ports including the ROG Bluetooth which can be used as any other USB Bluetooth would be. USB 3.0 is great and being x58 it's full speed. There are TONS of 4-pin fan headers on this board and they're spaced well. I was able to hook up every fan in my case to the motherboard and have them all monitored, yet I still have 3 open headers.

Cons: This one almost made me want to NOT buy the board: There's only one internal USB header. I own a Cosmos 1000 case and I need 2 headers for the front panel alone, so being a $400 board I expected at least 2 headers. There are only two options I know of to add extra headers, one of which is to buy a PCI to USB expansion card with a 9-pin header on it. That wouldn't work though, I was running two dual-slot video cards in SLI and that blocked the PCI slot. The only other option is the NZXT IU01, and it works perfect but can be tricky to find. The included SATA cables are also all have right angle on one end and straight on the other. This made it kind of hard for me to use them for cable management since the motherboard SATA connections are turned sideways, I had to use some other SATA cables I had laying around. The SATA 6 controller is a Marvell chip. Unfortunately Marvell doesn't pass TRIM commands down to SSDs so it really made the SATA 6 useless to me. I had to use the SATA II.

Overall Review: I was initially going to purchase the EVGA Classified 3 E770 but they quickly disappeared from stock. This board happened to be the next closest motherboard in specifications and it worked out perfectly since I already had every other part and just needed the board. I suggest buying the NZXT IU01 for this board, using only 1 USB header is a PITA. Core i7-950 Asus Rampage III Extreme 12GB DDR3-1600 G.skill (6x2GB) 2 EVGA GTX 580 SuperClocked in SLI Crucial C300 boot drive 2x WD Caviar black 1TB Cooler Master Hyper 212+ CM Cosmos 1000 Cooler Master Silent Pro 1000W PSU

Pros: I wanted the evga classified 3 but it was sold out across the net. wife said I had to spend the $ now or it would be gone. This was my second choice. I have owned a lot of asus board 3 of them still going as we speak. I must say all the reviews in here had me second guessing my decision. So I went out and read the reviews on 15 different over clocker and pc review sites on the net. None of them had doa's, bad mem slots, not recognizing mem or dropping hard drives. I went with my gut and the fact that 99% of them could be user error. New egg has always treated me right for years so if it was really junk. I would just rma it and get gigabyte GA-X58A-UD9 or wait for the evga classified 3. I bought, the box was sealed, put it together and it fired right up. It recognized all my mem and set to the xmp profile in the bios. Put my raid on it and its been running for a couple weeks now solid. I must have rebooted a hundred times by now. I have had it oc since its second day of its life.

Cons: Only one complaint. The 4 pin power plug on the bottom of the board facing down towards the bottom of the case under the last pci slot. This is one of the two 4 pin connections it needs to give your sli more power. I needed a molex connector that the wires came in from the side of the connector because of the clearance between the board and the bottom of the case. I think it should have been facing out towards the case door. but I bought the connector and all is fine. Here is some helpful info for you if you are thinking of buying this board and you can avoid all the troubles people are having in these posts. 1) have a good psu this board has 2/ 8 pin, 1/24 pin, and2/4 pin connections just to power the board if you don't most times it won't boot and you can burn your board or your cards if you are running multiple gpus. don't believe me read the manual. evga is selling a add on to give more power to the pci slots on their classified boards because they didn't put these two extra power

Overall Review: make sure you use memory that is on the qualified venders list for this board on asus site. Don't try to plug raided drives into the two red 6.0 sata slots because there is no raid controller for those two slots. If you use raid like me use the other black sata slots that have a raid controller also in the manual. It has a crazy bios so if you don't know what you are doing then I would be worried. I started oc this hours after I got it together to see what she could do on air. I got my cpu to a 4.0 without having to add volts. I benched vantage at 4.0 score= P39682 / CPU 65507 / GPU 38070 I went to a 4.5 on air but the temps were in the 70c. but she did it no problem no lock ups, bsod did it like a champ. I'm running it at 3.8 now as a stock speed all on auto. Id recommend this board to anyone it's a solid board. my pc= ASUS Rampage III Extreme Core i7-970 3.2GHz Six-Core COOLER MASTER Hyper N cpu cooler CORSAIR DOMINATOR GT 6GB DDR3 2000 (PC3 16000) 2= raid 0= VelociRaptor 300GB

Pros: Spec wise this board can not be beat

Cons: I just received my 2nd Rampage III Extreme from Newegg.com The first one I had I had to send back to NewEgg RMA because it would not power up and now this 2nd one is having the same problem. i do not know what is causing it. I hold a CompTIA A+ Certification as a IT Technician so I now about computers especially how do build and configure PC's , I've been doing it for 15 years. but I have never had this much problem with a motherboard like this one. I followed the user manual to the letter. So you tell me what is going on with this motherboard the Asus Rampage 3 Extreme. Both boards that I have had will not power up properly, I see lights on but that is all. And then to add insult to injury, Asus tech support will not help me because my case does not have a motherboard speaker. I have been using Asus motherboard for years but this is making me wonder if I want to recommend Asus motherboard to my friends and clients anymore. I paid $426.00 for this motherboard. Not cheap.

Overall Review: ????