I purchased an Asus Rampage III Extreme about a month ago.
I was impressed with what it had to offer. Too bad it did not live up to it.
I started having the same issues I have seen many others have with the Asus X58 motherboards, 2 or more memory modules dropping on reboots, limited and unreliable overclocks along with inexplicable blue screens. It's kind of funny how these issues started to develop and did not start rearing their ugly head until 2 weeks after I built it. I had two other friends have the same exact issues in the last 2 months, that tells me something is amiss @ the QC department @ Asus.
When I bought the Asus board, I also had the MSi Big Bang XPower in my hand, comparing the two. I wanted the Big Bang first more than the Rampage, but I went with Asus because I have not had a lick of problems with the previous 2 X58 boards from them, an Asus P6T, and an Asus P6TD Deluxe, and did not want to step into the realm of unknown with MSi.
MSi has won another customer. I have had the board installed for less than 24 hours and I can tell you that I am impressed. Big Bang for the Buck is what it should be named! I was able to achieve a stable 4ghz over clock with little effort, and I will enjoy pushing it further.
Things I like:
No PCI slots! Who uses those ancient things?
No IDE connections! Come on, get with it people, IDE has been obsolete for years.
No floppy connection! Floppy disks? Really? I can write the zeros and ones with pen and paper faster than those archaic storage devices.
Black and blue color layout, looks great with my Corsair Obsidian case and blue LEDs.
OC Dashboard, tweaks at your finger tips.
Ample fan headers.
Easy to understand BIOS, felt natural going through the settings and over clocking.
Awesome performance! It's barely faster than the Rampage III Extreme in games.
Things I don't like:
It shipped with the 1.2 BIOS, this would not allow all 6 of my Corsair Memory modules to work. Flashing to the latest stable BIOS of 1.4 fixed this issue.
Marvell Sata3 controller, a total waste of board space, it runs on a single PCIE lane which is limited to roughly 5gbs, and the controller has dismal RAID performance.
Typographical errors in the BIOS, I know it sounds anal-retentive, if you can't spell, how the heck can I trust you to write good code?
No NVIDIA NF200 ICs, with this many PCIE slots, that really would have been a nice bonus.
The bads do not outweigh the goods, they are just little things.
I have spent a good 8 hours with the board, verifying stability, benchmarking, and playing a few games.
I knew 1 month ago when I wanted this board there was a reason, this thing simply works, has sexy good looks, and is made of high quality components.
I should have bought it in the first place.
I was impressed with what it had to offer. Too bad it did not live up to it.
I started having the same issues I have seen many others have with the Asus X58 motherboards, 2 or more memory modules dropping on reboots, limited and unreliable overclocks along with inexplicable blue screens. It's kind of funny how these issues started to develop and did not start rearing their ugly head until 2 weeks after I built it. I had two other friends have the same exact issues in the last 2 months, that tells me something is amiss @ the QC department @ Asus.
When I bought the Asus board, I also had the MSi Big Bang XPower in my hand, comparing the two. I wanted the Big Bang first more than the Rampage, but I went with Asus because I have not had a lick of problems with the previous 2 X58 boards from them, an Asus P6T, and an Asus P6TD Deluxe, and did not want to step into the realm of unknown with MSi.
MSi has won another customer. I have had the board installed for less than 24 hours and I can tell you that I am impressed. Big Bang for the Buck is what it should be named! I was able to achieve a stable 4ghz over clock with little effort, and I will enjoy pushing it further.
Things I like:
No PCI slots! Who uses those ancient things?
No IDE connections! Come on, get with it people, IDE has been obsolete for years.
No floppy connection! Floppy disks? Really? I can write the zeros and ones with pen and paper faster than those archaic storage devices.
Black and blue color layout, looks great with my Corsair Obsidian case and blue LEDs.
OC Dashboard, tweaks at your finger tips.
Ample fan headers.
Easy to understand BIOS, felt natural going through the settings and over clocking.
Awesome performance! It's barely faster than the Rampage III Extreme in games.
Things I don't like:
It shipped with the 1.2 BIOS, this would not allow all 6 of my Corsair Memory modules to work. Flashing to the latest stable BIOS of 1.4 fixed this issue.
Marvell Sata3 controller, a total waste of board space, it runs on a single PCIE lane which is limited to roughly 5gbs, and the controller has dismal RAID performance.
Typographical errors in the BIOS, I know it sounds anal-retentive, if you can't spell, how the heck can I trust you to write good code?
No NVIDIA NF200 ICs, with this many PCIE slots, that really would have been a nice bonus.
The bads do not outweigh the goods, they are just little things.
I have spent a good 8 hours with the board, verifying stability, benchmarking, and playing a few games.
I knew 1 month ago when I wanted this board there was a reason, this thing simply works, has sexy good looks, and is made of high quality components.
I should have bought it in the first place.
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