***Asus Rampage III Extreme Owners Thread***

[zoson]

The above statement can be taken as the following.

Get enhanced Scalability... - When you raid 0 you get less performance than with one drive.

Double the Bandwidth of current bus systems.... - I’m the ICH10R scales over 500MB/s when used in raid 0. The limit on the 6Gb/s controller if max was ever possible is 500MB/s. Not 1000MB/s.

Faster data retrieval... - Only if your using mechanical drives.

this motherboard delivers up to 6.0Gb/s data transfer rates.. - THIS IS IMPOSSIBLE. Its capped at 5Gb/s due to that being the max that one PCI 2.0 lane will ever achieve.

This is wrong.
The theoretical maximum of a single PCI-E lane is 640MB/sec, which is above 5.0Gb/sec.
PCIe 2.0 delivers 5 GT/s, but employs an 8b/10b encoding scheme which results in a 20 percent ((10-8)/10) overhead on the raw bit rate, which brings transfer down to about 500MB/s.

The sale of all motherboards by Asus, Gigabyte, Intel are sold under false information.

I bought my Asus Rampage Extreme 3 as an upgrade from an extreme 2. Because it had 6Gb/s controller and I had every intention of using it when the drives became available. I bought two C300 drives and ran into the issue where they where no longer detected on the Marvell chip after a windows install. So the drives where returned to Newegg for a refund after restocking fee. So fast forward to 3 weeks ago when I bought 2 Intel 510 120GB drives I bought them with the purpose of making use of Asus ROG super speed drive app (raids 2 drives to raid 0 on the same Marvell controller). Its now on its way back to Asus because I can not get the board to run above 330MB/s in raid 0 on the Marvell controller (something i believe is due to limitations on the board not the drives). On a standalone LSI 9240 4I I get 770MB/s in raid 0. The only drawback to this is I have to impede on the performance of my SLI setup to be able to use the card.

My two x25-m G2's get up to 480MB/s reads on my marvell chip with superspeed. You're doing it wrong. Maybe drive alignment or stripe size.

in summary
I bought the board purely for the 6Gb/s controller because it was advertised. It failed to do just that. I should have stayed with my rampage 2 Extreme and bought the card I ended up buying anyway and saved a lot of money.

Asus support has sucked through out all of this.
My motherboards had to go back to asus. They had no stock to process a Advanced RMA so I had to buy another motherboard in the mean time.

Some Mod on Asus website insists its ok to get 250MB/s sustained transfer on the Marvell controller because the rest is lost to system overhead.

Tech support informed me that they would not upgrade or downgrade to a board that meet the advertised statements because its not Asus policy. He then said to sell my board and go and buy a new one for my needs.

Sounds to me like you didn't do your research before you purchased and got burned. You won't find any pity here.