Layout

Like its name already says the Rapage III Black Edition has been covered almost completely with a black painting. There are only a few places where you'll find red spots like for example the SATA ports, the start button as well as some aluminium fins at the chipset cooler. Furthermore you can also see that the PCB is covered in matte black which in our opinion looks quite cool. In the end the Rampage III Black Edition is no exception regarding ASUS' ROG-series: it is a very good looking a nicly designed motherboard.

ASUS equips their upcoming overclocking and gaming motherboard with a digital power design, whereas the CPU gets eight. Furthermore also QPI, northbridge and memory, each get three additional phases. Of all the components which can rely on separate phases CPU, QPI and DRAM also get a proadlizer. Another thing one can do with the Rampage III Black Edition concerns the realtime adjustment of power behaviour.

Totally you'll find six DIMM-slots on the ASUS Rampage II Black Edition. Officially supported are DDR3-2200(OC) / 2133 (OC) / 1866 / 1600 / 1333 / 1066 with up to 32 GByte capacity. Positioning of the DIMM-slots has been well thought which means they aren't too close to the CPU socket. Therefore there wont be too many incompatibilities between huge CPU coolers and big memory modules. What might also be a reason that there is more space than with other boards is the fact that the Rampage III Extreme Black Edition comes with an extended ATX form factor.

Northbridge as well as the current converters are being held at adequate temperatures via a passive heatpipe cooling solution. The southbridge got a passive cooling block which has not been integrated into the heatpipe loop of northbridge and VRM. The fact that the cooling blocks around the CPU socket aren't too big makes it comfortable to install a big aircooler. We also noticed the very high manufacturing quality of the cooling blocks and their weight which is quite immense.