14 DAY TRIAL // Officially announced more than a month ago, the Asus Rampage III Black Edition motherboard made its appearance at the CeBIT 2011 fair, which takes place right now in Hannover, Germany, suggesting we aren't that far off from the board's launch.
The Rampage III Black Edition is built on top of Intel's X58 chipset and is compatible with various LGA 1366 processors, including the recently launched Core i7 990X CPU which features six processing cores clocked at 3.46GHz.
In addition to the Intel processors, the motherboard can house up to four graphics cards, thanks to the quad PCI Express x16 slots available, six DDR3 DIMM modules, as well as up to eight SATA storage devices.
When all the four PCI Express x16 slots are populated, they will work at x8 speeds and additional power may be provided to the GPUs via a MOLEX plug located on the edge of the board.
The expandability options of the Rampage III Black Edition are completed by two PCI Express x1 slots, one of which can be used for installing the Asus ThunderBolt add-on card.
This card was specially designed in order to offer extra functionality to its users as it bundles together an Asus Xonar high-definition audio chip with a headset amplifier and a Bigfoot Killer network card (the E2100 Killer NIC).
To make its board more overclocking friendly, Asus has also added an on-board debug LCD, on-board power, reset and clear CMOS buttons, voltage read points as well as four dip-switches that allows uses to enable, or disable, each PCI Express x16 slot.
The rear I/O panel features a wide assortment of connectors, including USB 3.0 and eSATA, and a Bluetooth 3.0, 802.11 b/g/n WiFi add-on card. An additional USB 3.0 header is also available.
No details were provided regarding market availability, but the board is expected to reach us really soon. (via AwardFabrik)
