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ASUS uses a full-sized ATX motherboard for the Rampage III Formula board. This offers the manufacturer more options when it comes to layout compared to the micro-ATX Rampage III Gene and it shows in the design. ASUS really took it to the next level with the Rampage III Formula including their Extreme Design Digi+ PWMs as part of the motherboard.
The top right hand corner of the board starts off with an 8-pin power adapter. To the right of the 8-pin power connector are two 4-pin fan headers.The board has 8 total fan headers supporting PWM fans for full control of the fan speeds in the BIOS. The MOSFets have heatsinks connected by a heatpipe that leads out to the D58 chipset then the ICH10R Souhbridge. You can install the optional fan on the MOSFET heatsinks but a better place would be on the X58 NB heatsink.
Moving further on the right side of the board we see that ASUS has outfitted the Rampage III Formula with a VRM test header followed by a Power fan header. The bottom of the board starts off with a Start button that acts as a Power button, followed by a Reset button, then the MemOK! button. To the left of the MemOK! button is the 24-pin power connector.
The next item on the board is the SATA ports. This board supports True SATA 6Gb/second performance on two of the ports, that are red on the board. The other SATA ports on the board are 3Gb/second ports. All SATA ports on the board are sideways facing, allowing for video cards of extreme length to be installed without fear of interference from the SATA ports on installation/removal.
The left side of the board starts off with the BIOS Switch button that allows you to switch between BIOSes on boot. The next item is the FRONT Panel connectors followed by four USB headers and a OC Station header for the OC Station utility. This is followed by a Firewire header. ASUS has included two 2-pin headers for connecting sensors to on the board.
In terms of expansion as you would expect from a Republic of Gamers board with three PCI Express x16 slots. Note that the X58 chipset has access to 36 PCI Express 2.0 lanes, meaning that the two first slots support at x16 each and the third slot supports at x4 data rate. There is enough room on the board to run three dual-slot cards at the same time. x58 is the highest end of the Intel chipset lineup.
The rear I/O on the board consists of a single PS/2 port for the keyboard, a S/PDIF Out Optical port, a Firewire port, a RJ-45 port for the onboard LAN, 6 jacks for the onboard audio which is provided by the SupremeFX X-FI audio chip, a Clear CMOS button, two External SATA ports (one of which is powered), the ROG Connect On/Off switch, 2 USB 3.0 ports controlled by a NEC chip, and 7 USB 2.0/1.1 ports (one of which is used for ROG Connect.
