ASUS Offers Pictures Of High-End Rampage III Extreme Motherboard

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Although it was hinted at during CES, ASUS has showed off the official press shots for their new motherboard in their ROG line, the Rampage III Extreme. The ROG (Republic of Gamers) is ASUS’ brand for their high-end enthusiast parts and the Rampage III Extreme motherboard looks like it will fit into that class.

The ROG Rampage III Extreme is based on the Intel X58 chipset, and it has an Intel LGA 1366 processor socket on it, with support for all the latest Core i7 processors, including the i7-980X. As you can tell by the picture, the Rampage III has a ton of heatsinks on it, it looks to have a lot of heating support on it. In addition to the LGA 1366 processor, it’s got four PCI-E slots on the lower-half, managed by an NVIDIA nForce 200 southbridge. It’ll also have DDR3 memory slots, too, for the fastest memory out there currently.

Those stats were about as far as the official word from ASUS has gone, regarding the official stats of the new motherboard. However, with today’s release of the official press shots, we’ve learned a bit more about the upcoming high-end board. It’ll also have support for USB 3.0 and SATA 3.0. In addition to those new technologies, the board was also spied by having some older USB 3.0 ports, eSATA and Firewire ports. ASUS has promised Gigabit Ethernet and 7.1-surround sound for the audio on the back.

Like the earlier ROG board, the Maximus III Extreme, the Rampage III will have the feature that will allow you to overclock and adjust other BiOS settings via a Bluetooth mobile phone. That feature got some press last year, although I doubt many people are actively using it.

ASUS should be unveiling the motherboard any day now. Until then, we don’t have any official specs (aside from what we gather from the pictures and what ASUS reps have told people at trade shows), any pricing or any release date information. One thing is certain, this mainboard won’t be cheap.