ASUS Rampage III Formula LGA 1366 Intel X58 SATA 6Gb/s 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: Very nice layout, USB3, Sata3, all the future proofing you would want. IOH and ICH run around 35 to 40 C inside of an AZZA Solano case with stock fans. ROG connect seems pretty cool, although I have not tried it. Packaging and accessories were very nice, with some added bonuses including mini zip ties, Label stickers to label your boot drive etc. (nice touch) Very highly recommend this board.

Cons: Not really a con but just be aware. When I got everything necessary for a boot-up assembled, I decided to see if everything would boot before finishing the build. When I got it booted and looked around in the bios I decided to check some temps. I noticed that the IOH was hovering around the 78c mark (WHAA?o.0), so I immediately shut down and after some looking around I discovered that between the thermal pad/paste and the IOH chip there was a small piece of paper/plastic from what looks like a manufacturing process that didn't get taken off before the chipset cooler was installed. Removed the plastic and replaced the thermal pad/paste (due to it being slightly offset on the heat sink) with the same paste I am using for my processor. Good thing I decided to check that out before I decided to finish the build.

Overall Review: Overall good board. Changing over from Gigabyte to ASUS due to the booth at Quakecon ASUS had setup. As always A+ for newegg for fast shipping. The Egg ROCKS!

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.

Pros: Great looking board(first one I had) everything is working great and runs pretty smooth so far....Wish I had more to say about that.See Cons

Cons: You must understand my complete and utter frustration with this board and asus customer service. First board I received Ram slots 1,2,4,5,6 were all dead. Shipping the board back cost an extra 30$. The "new" board I got works fine so far, but here is my issue.... That nice little silver sound card top is not on the new board I received. The heat fins by the CPU the ones on the side are bent!! The edge fin being bent so far back when I tried to straighten out almost snapped off. I could tell that board has been used before as I can see silver grease still left over near the CPU!!. I understand they probably tested the board before hand but sending me the board in such bad condition. There is even a dent in Southbride Intel ICH cover. I do not want to cough up another 30$ to send this board back and I dont think I could now seeing how there is "physical damage that I did not cause. I tried calling asus and again like many others I got the --> cont on Other thoughts

Overall Review: the run around from the rep saying to call back next hour and hanging up on me. This happened to me for two days straight. The latest call about the damage on the board the guy said if the sound is working then it is not an issue. But the issue is that I paid nearly 300$ for this and to first off receive a junk board and then receiving a damaged and tarnished board is unacceptable. I bought the board nearly a year ago so I cant go through New Egg any longer so I do not blame them. But honestly paying 300$ for a broken then a "new" damaged board is unacceptable. I seriously want my money back.

Pros: Specs....

Cons: I build a new computer every 2 years. Been using ASUS mobos for all of that time. I've heard the horror stories of others. Bought this board and the 2nd day, it failed to POST to BIOS. Diagnostic lights said CPU was bad. Bought a new one and it did the same thing. Put CPU into another mobo and both worked fine. When I got the mobo running again in about a month, my RAID 1 array went into degrade mode. WD diagnostics showed drives were good. Called tech support. Went through their fixes, which I'd already done. Tech told me he would get me an RMA.....2 months later, he tells me I have to talk to another dept. Been waiting since April....can get no response, nor can I gen an RMA. What a waste of my hard earned money. Gonna buy another board and never use ASUS again.

Pros: Nice board with some nice features and a good bios. Switchable Bios. Just press the little red button on the lower right hand corner to change between two different bios settings. One piece heat sink design for the North and Southbridge. Note that this heatsink is held in place with screws which makes it A) easier to remove and B) achieve better contact with the chip. The Rampage III Gene's Southbridge heatsink is held in place with annoying push pins. On that board, only 2/3 of the chip was touching the heatsink. That's just messed up. Comes with a small fan for additional cooling of the Northbridge. Very stable thus far. I'm lucky enough to have a decent I7 930 which I have clocked to 4+ ghz on 1.3 vcore and 100% Prime95 stable (72° C max with water cooling) for 11 hours and counting. MemOK feature seems very nice. I have no personal experience with it yet thankfully. Rampage boards (and other Asus boards I assume) are easy to flash the bios using the EZ Flas

Cons: The thermal compound on the Northbridge leaves a lot to be desired. I replaced mine immediately with Arctic Silver. I really had to screw it down for it to make full contact with the chip. The Southbridge uses a thermal pad. Asus customer service is pathetic. A friend of mine was put on hold and then simply hung up on when she called them with a question about her brand new Asus monitor. After reading other people having similar experiences with Asus customer service, I am dreading the day I have to call them because I have some faulty hardware. No onboard speaker for bios and beep codes. Really? They couldn't add a 50 cent part to a $300 board?

Overall Review: I was previously using an EVGA X58 3 way SLI and the instability of that board drove me nuts which is why I bought this board. I would have bought another Rampage III Gene but the fact that it uses pushpins for one of the heatsinks is inexcusable for a higher end board. The major differences between this board and the Extreme III are as follows. Credit goes to user SuperShanks from Anandtech forums. ---- Terminals Rather than simple measuring points for multimeter voltage measuring. So you can have constant real time monitoring on the Extreme. Bluetooth Bluetooth Module Accessory Card Bluetooth V2.0/V2.1+EDR RC Bluetooth On/Off Switch PWM Design a beefier phase design, Formula * 8-phase CPU power. * 3-phase QPI/DRAM power. * 2-phase NB power. * 2-phase Memory Power. Extreme * 8-phase CPU power. * 3-phase QPI/DRAM power. * 3-phase NB power. * 3-phase Memory Power. ---- Overall the board is nice but $300 is too much for this board. $250-$275 would be much mo

Pros: The motherboard looks sleek. I really like the red/black color scheme. There are nice, illuminated power and reset buttons conveniently located near the RAM slots. Also included is an lighted "clear CMOS" button on the back of the board for easy access through the case when the board is mounted. The motherboard can run two PCI 2.0 slots at 16x simultaneously...sweet.

Cons: I've been through two of these boards now, both of them with the same deal-breaking issue. The boards would not post after changing ANY setting(s) in the BIOS. I verified that the issues were not caused by my components in that they came out of working Gigabyte motherboard setup. They worked fine again in the Gigabyte board after the RMAs (more on this in "Other Thoughts")

Overall Review: This board ended up wasting about 3 weeks of my time after two proved to be defective. Newegg was great with the RMAs and waived the restocking fee and even gave me a free UPS label to send the second board back for a refund. Asus support did answer the phone consistently after waiting only about five minutes on average. They quickly identified the issue to be irreparable and recommended RMA. I ended up with an MSI Big Bang Xpower board and everything is working great with a decent overclock on an i7 920 (2.67 to 3.8). I liked my Gigabyte board, but I needed more room from the PCI 2.0 slots for an extra video card. That board put the two cards right on top of one another, causing heating issues.

Pros: um?...it arrived?...it's pretty?

Cons: too many to list, so long story short, it didn't work and I brought another MB from Asus ( sabertooth x58 ) to replace this one and THAT TOO didn't work either

Overall Review: I'm sure it works great for alot of people, I mean it does seem to have good reviews and all that, but to purchase two MB of the same brand "but" different models and have them both arrived not working is more than enough for me to stay away from ASUS