Gadgetory

so today we're gonna be having a look at the rampage 3 fórmula motherboard this is from a Seuss's republic of gamers line but you can tell from the suffix formula that it's actually a value member of their republic of gamers line which may seem like a looks a little bit counterintuitive but it is so the rampage 3 extreme is the fully featured board and the rampage 3 formula is kind of like a little brother so this is a core i7 motherboard that means it has support for all the latest LGA 1366 CPUs that means you got support for 6 cores quad-core Xand that's pretty much all you have on 1366 because it is an enthusiast platform core i7 xtreme core i7 you've got support for SLI as well as each guy crossfire X let's have a look at the box itself you can see a handy little window where you've got three PCI Express 16x plus but we'll talk more about the board in a minute let's talk about a couple of the key features so you've got ROG Connect which is a USB interface for plugging in on a different computer to actually control BIOS options on this particular board you've got game first technology which is a lan feature that it has in order to give you the the speed you need to pone awesome I love it as well as to give your games priority access to any land functions you've bought BIOS flashback so you have two BIOS from which you can actually choose which one you want to boot from as well as supreme FX X Phi 2 built-in so that's creative a solution for your onboard sound extreme engine DIGI+ is a powerful combination of analog and digital design elements as well as an included copy of Kaspersky antivirus on the back in a typical rog fashion it has exactly the same stuff except for oh it also mentions 3-way SLI and CrossFireX so that's that's a good thing I suppose it has one additional feature list already listed on the front so let's have a look at the accessory package which as you might expect that the na roda board is quite complete you got a 3-way SLI bridge you have an IO shield with their spongy backing on it you also have some zip ties for cable management you have a crossfire bridge a nice long flexible SLI bridge you've got your cue connectors for easy plugging in of the front USB as well as the front panel connectors a user's guide including a Republic of gamers sticker as well as a support DVD which you should throw away and download the latest from the assist website you have an optional fan as well as an installation guide for it so that's only if you're using water cooling or a passive or a very low airflow cooler you've got an eSATA bracket as well as USB 2.0 there's your cable for our OD Connect which is a standard USB eight to a male-male cable then you've got six SATA 2 cables two SATA three cables please note that those are identical other than the color there is no physical difference between a SATA 2 cable and a SATA 3 cable in terms of data transmission I mean I guess if you had a really terrible quality SATA 2 cable it might not work at SATA 3 speeds but I mean I really find that quite quite far-fetched indeed alright so let's get the motherboard out itself and have a look at it as always a soos has just nailed the aesthetic on this particular board they're Republic of gamers boards have really been outstanding lately in that regard so we've got a black PCB with black nickel-plated as well as red accents it looks just phenomenal so let's have a look at the overall layout camera man's very interested in the PWM cooling here so you can see that that is connected via a couple of different heat pipes so the top one over here is connected by a heat pipe to the bottom one so you can see those two are sharing their load a little bit and then you have a heat pipe connecting the the left PWM cooler to the Northbridge cooler down to oh that's a separate heat pipe itself no no it's not that's the same heat pipe that's flattened out and then it curves up and that connects the Southbridge as well so let's look at the overall board layout we'll start with the CPU sockets on cameraman if you can come direct your attention over here that is an LGA 1366 socket I already mentioned the CPU support but I will say it again core i7 as well as core i7 extreme you've got your 8 pin power connector with the optional 4 pin cover placed on it by default up here in the top left corner and it's ideal location you've got your 6 Ram slots supporting dual dual channel you're supporting dual sets of triple channel ddr3 memory with the quick installed memory dim slot so you can see that there are only clips on the one side the other side has no clips so you're meant to insert the module this way and then clip it down on the one side your 24 pin connector is in its ideal location along the right-hand edge of the board and you've also got start reset and all of your voltage measurement options all along the top right hand side of the board as well in very very conveniently located fashion so down here we have the Go button we have a few cue reset up here I had actually missed that button and then moving down the board Kleber man still looking at all the buttons oh he's meeting for it to focus I see what he's doing now ok so let's move down and have a look at these data options so we've got 6 SATA 2 ports remember Intel still does not have support natively for SATA 3 on their chipset so it's actually a Marvell chipset right there that is running the SATA 3 6 gigabit per second port so you do have two of those moving down the board we have a BIOS reset switch right here although that's far less conveniently located than the one that I already saw on the back panel here's your front panel connectors as well as you another fan connector you've got your dual BIOS chips right there so it's actually about to physical chips this is not some cheap hack to physical BIOS chips that you can switch in between you've got your front USB ports here as well as more of them over here I'm not sure which of these are us being which are not to be perfectly honest alright we've got two more fan connectors and I'm going to do a quick count to the bank before we're done here firewire port and then let's look at the PCI Express layout so yeah there's the X Phi 2 supreme effects cameraman is making his way to the PCI Express slots we start with a PCIe 1x slot up at the top here and then we have a PCIe 16x slot now please note there is an absence of a slot here the assumption is that if you're buying a republic of gamers board and this is a good assumption that you're probably using a dual slot graphics card but you should be so you don't need a slot here basically all right then we've got another PCI Express 16x slot a PCIe 1x 16x and a PCI slot so if you're running dual card SLI or crossfire you're going to use these two which means you're going to cover this one your blank you're going to cover this one in a PCI slot that will leave you with two PCIe 1x slots that will remain usable we've bought an auxiliary molex power connector here so if you are running up to three cards and then you'll cover almost all of your slots except this guy then you should plug that in because otherwise you're drawing just too much power out of the 24 pin connector now let's have a look at the back of the board on the i/o shield we've got a purple ps2 port so that's going to be keyboard only then we've got one two three four five six oh it's not one of those combo ports new it's not so we have six USB 2.0 ports we have a powered eSATA port as well as a regular eSATA port and then we have a clear CMOS switch optical audio out the rog connect button USB 3.0 support Gigabit LAN and those look like gold-plated 7.1 audio connectors and before we're done I did promise account of the four pin fan connectors so we have one two up here by the CPU socket and we have another one over here on the top right of the board we have another one down here by the Northbridge so that is I don't know four and then down at the bottom of the board we find another five six seven total so that means that you can actually control all of those fans via the BIOS and hold on one two three four five six seven eight eight there's one more over here by the 24 pin connector so you can actually control eight fans via the BIOS software and you can optimize them for performance or for silence that's a pretty cool feature and they all support PWM there's the back of the board in case you care thank you for checking out my unboxing of the rampage 3 formula don't forget to subscribe to - tech tips