 By popular demand I can't believe how many people have asked me to unbox this the ASUS Rampage 3 Black Edition motherboard, so this is part of their Republic of Gamers brand. This is an x58 That is an LGA 1366 motherboard it supports core i7 extremes core i7s Nvidia SLI and ATI crossfire I think they mean AMD crossfire, but the badge has yet to be updated Let's go around to the back where we will find a couple of things first There's an ROG Thunderbolt so that appears to be I don't know somethings and looks like a sound card So we'll get a little bit into that looks like it has external power, so that's got to have a headphone amp on it We've got bluetooth v3.0. Okay. We've got ROG connect which is their Their overclocking feature which allows you to use another computer to plug into here and then alter overclocking settings as well as extreme engine Digi plus which is their VRM solution alright everything else on here on the back is pretty straightforward So why don't we go ahead and have a look at what is presumably a window into the future of motherboards There's the Thunderbolt look at that powered by Oxnard. I mean zonar. Sorry sorry So we'll look at that more later, but let's have a look at what's in here So first of all we have a built-in headphone amp aha sound greater Yeah, will sound greater with a headphone amp guarantee What it's what else do we have here? Okay? So it looks like some sort of processing chip. Okay? That's good We have a dedicated NPU, so that's a killer e 2100 dedicated really is that a full e 2100 Wow cool, okay, so there you go you got a PCIe 1x killer Killer Nick alright extreme engine digi plus okay analog and digital design elements combined for power Okay, ROG connect. We've already covered that bluetooth v3.0. So diverse and Wi-Fi enjoyment new technology lifestyle excellent conspiracy antivirus And that's pretty much it, so let's start opening this thing up I'm actually excited about this because I did not even know that this product existed until I had Like 300 billion requests to unbox it all over my channel over my inbox I even had some guy email me it's like okay Don't know how you got my email, but like thank you for requesting an unboxing in it. I'll see what I can do Okay, here. We are Sue lots of accessories look at this so we have a couple of Wi-Fi antennas I remember these I had one of these with my a 8n 32 SLI deluxe I think that's around the time they started shipping these these Wi-Fi antennas with onboard Wi-Fi on their motherboards And they stopped doing it for a while all right. We've got a USB USB 2.0 and eSata PCI bracket got a little chipset fan which probably sounds horrible Don't recommend using that in all likelihood okay. We've got an extension cable for USB Okay, oh or on board or front panel audio. Maybe I don't know I don't know what this is for Okay, next we've got some SATA 3 cables which are exactly the same as the 6 SATA 2 cables So that's 2 SATA 3 6 SATA 2 cables except for the color okay. We've got the ROG connect USB cable Let me throw all these back in here There we are. We've got a 3-way SLI bridge We have a 2-way SLI bridge We have a crossfire bridge Okay, we have their Q connector which is for the front panel connectors as well as one USB 2.0 header Make it a little easier to plug in we've got some zip ties. We have an IO shield some temperature probes a User guide we're on page 3 black. It's a heavy user guide. That's like thick look at that Okay, and then we have a an Intel chipset and support DVD as well as a Republic of Gamers sticker Throw away the DVD there Look at this audio precision test report Thunderbolt powered by Zonar So assists disclaimer the information and contents contained in the something something okay, so basically they're just showing it's really good Cool, thanks guys. Okay, then we got a big old case sticker and let's go ahead and Put that back to you all right motherboard time Okay Thunderbolt why don't we do the Thunderbolt a little bit later actually give me two seconds here guys All right, so we're gonna have a look at the Thunderbolt powered by Zonar first, so this is a a PCIe 1x combo card it includes not only the LAN port but also the Zonar aspects which are the sound aspects of The very high-end LAN and sound solution that comes with this board so you've got a spit if out You've also got a line out and a line in Okay moving around we've got a matte black PCB, and you can see right on the back here You've got rampage 3 black edition as well as your serial number information all on there, okay? We've also got front audio out which is right here And at the back of the card we've got a USB connection Which is evidently what that little USB extension cable was for and then we've also got a molex power connector So that is going to provide power to the amplified Audio out port Alright, let's have a look at the motherboard itself so the first thing I notice about it three guesses guys matte black PCB love it anything with a matte black PCB could be in my system no problem because matte black PCBs look awesome next thing I notice about this board is it has a non-standard layout It is slightly wider than an ATX spec an ATX board would normally end right about here Okay, this one is just a little bit wide so you don't need additional mounting holes You don't need an e ATX case, but you will need It's a little bit more width on the edge of your motherboard tray in order to install this board So you can see it's only one two three four five six seven in length in length or in height So it's a standard ATX height, but it's a little bit wide alright So let's start at the CPU socket right in the middle because that's a good place to start as I mentioned before that is an LGA 1366 socket So that has full support for all the core i7 extremes core i7s on the LGA 1366 Platform here. We've got the PWM which includes a very very slick looking cooler Okay, so there you go. There's some kind of NEC DG slash token talking tokeen however you pronounce that chip here as well as eight phases of their Digi plus PWM Actually hold on bear with me a moment Yes, eight plus three phase power so what that means is we've got eight higher quality phases as opposed to Putting a ton of lower quality phases on this particular motherboard that is the route asus has decided to go Moving over here. We've got support for triple channel memory up to six DIMMs, so it uses asus's Easy slot so that means you only have to actually fasten the clip on the one side You just slide it in the one side put it in and then you push the clip in like this We've got a post LED indicator, so that'll give you post codes right there. We have start and reset switches on board We've also got voltage checkpoints all down here, so we've got a couple grounds We've got CPU CPU PLL QPI IOH IOH PCIe ICH ICH PCIe and RAM So that's actually more voltage checkpoints than I've seen on I think any other board here are the PCIe 16x switches So you can actually use these to easily diagnose video cards This is this feature there have been times when I would have pretty much done anything for this feature because when you install I don't hear in the camera sideways like that When you install a couple of video cards, and they're you know they got full cover liquid cooling blocks on them And you're trying to figure out okay You have a video problem is the is the bottom card dead the easiest way to find out would be to go like this Turn off your top slot boom all of a sudden That's your primary PCIe slot now you can find out if that card's dead or if it's something else That's wrong with your system, so it's great for for troubleshooting. They've also got This button which is for making sure that the system will post 100% no problem With the any memory no matter what the spec is 24 pin power here We've got also a USB 3.0 front panel header So you can use that on any new case that supports a USB 3.0 USB 3.0 front ports via a header We've also got storage here, so we've got six SATA 2 3 gigabit per second as well as two SATA 3 6 gigabit per second ports We've got a pretty sweet looking Southbridge heat sink which it has a suce branding on it It's got kind of a matte black finish the entire board almost is black other than a couple little red accents Which look really good dual bios right here You can see we've got two dedicated bios chips a couple front USB ports Oh, yeah front panel switches as well as a bios clear switch right here There's a ton of four pin PWM fan connectors I'll count them in a minute, but there's just seems to be a ton on this board. We've got a molex Easy plug here, so that's if you're loading this up with graphics cards You might need to provide some auxiliary power to prevent your 24 pin connector from burning out from providing all that juice all through the board Okay, we've got a front audio connector on the motherboard itself as well Using x5 to supreme FX so if you don't want to use the Thunderbolt card you still have Pretty decent onboard audio which is kind of cool Okay, so that's your that's that you also have pretty decent onboard ethernet So they're using the Intel ethernet as opposed to a third-party chip For the onboard ethernet as well if you don't want to use the killer e 2100 that comes on the Thunderbolt card So let's have a look at what we've got. Oh, yeah, I promised to count the four pin PWM fan connectors Oh one more other thing that I haven't shown yet, too Is it has two PCIe eight pin connectors a PCIe two CPU EPS eight pin connectors up here? So you're going to need to access those from the top probably one of them is optional But providing both will give you potentially more current to the CPU sockets. We've got one two three four Just zoom out so you can see where these are four five six seven eight Eight four pin PWM fan connectors all over this motherboard craziness. Oh, yeah Here's where that fan goes on the northbridge heatsink So that's where I mentioned there was a red accent there So you can bolt that fan on there get a little bit of additional cooling if you are using water cooling or some other kind Of cooling that doesn't provide any incidental air flow to the northbridge heatsink alright So let's have a look at the back where we will find our bluetooth 3.0 as well as wireless LAN 802.1 1b gn. There's also another reset switch up here. That's a very peculiar place for it alright and an additional one here Kidding me. Yeah, okay. There's a clear cmo switch there, okay? We've got one of those ps2 mouse keyboard combo ports We have one two three four five six USB 2.0 ports here on the back We have two USB 3.0 ports two eSATA ports We have our ROG connect button as well as the USB port for that the Intel LAN that I mentioned before as well as the Creative x5 to supreme FX sound that I mentioned before so this is a decked out Motherboard there is no doubt about it We've also got some additional heat sinkery going on on the back here for the PWM as well as the standard LGA 1366 backplate all of the heat sinks on the front are attached via screws Which is nice because they can't come out like push pins also means if you need to take them off and put them back on You don't risk damaging the push pins making it impossible Thank you for checking out my unboxing of the rampage 3 black edition from asus Don't forget to subscribe to lines tech tips from our unboxings reviews and other computer videos So I did have to RTM for a couple of these things First of all there is an LN 2 mode jumper over here And that along with the Q reset button over here Which actually stops power to the CPU to allow you to recover from a non posting state? When you are using liquid nitrogen is some of the extreme overclocking features that we have on this here particular board There's also a jumper for a load line calibration on the QPI Okay, we also have whoops we also clarified what this guy down here does. This is a bio switch, so you can actually switch Between these two bios chips here on the board, and I think that's pretty much all that we wanted to cover here