Holy hell that's a ton of caps near the CPU. I count 19 coils which means 19 phase power right? I kind of wish that mobo makers didn't try to feed off the 'more is bettar' aspect of marketing by just throw more phases in their CPU power design. It helps to a point but after a certain point it's just about the fact that more phases can be used in a less expensive design - I suppose that's ok if it means a less expensive board on the balance but it's usually used as a marketing bullet point so that's less likely.

Looks like this one may fall into the why-are-we-competing-with-all-those-bottom-feeders-let's-charge-$600-for-a-motherboard category.

I personally would not ever buy a product from the Republic of Gamers. I'm much more partial to products from the Theocracy of 1337.

A color scheme that forces you to buy an AMD graphics card...

Asus's market segmentation confuses the hell out of me. If you look at their P35/P45 boards and their X38/X48 boards, the prices don't just significantly overlap, the P45 can be just as expensive as the X48, even though performance is limited in comparison.

Seems to me that this sort of overlap doesn't differentiate the products that well.

Couple of Braidwood flash chips soldered on behind the PCIe slots, or are those something else?

Need...Moar! I see there are pins for a so-dimm slot. why did they not implement?

Looks like the "Vamped Out" edition. USB powered fangs included? Suck every drop of performance out? I like it. Hell, looks like that might be worth an extra $20.

Lynnfield is gonna be sweet.

I don't plan on ever building my own system again but holy shit thats sexy.

It looks like there's a fun/exhausting autumn in store for the TR reviewers when the Lynnfield wave hits. Though when you stack on the DX11 cards and Intel's next-gen SSDs (plus all the calls to "redo all the tests on Windows 7!") it may shape up more like a calendar-ending tsunami.

Rampapge Extreme is still the best board so far based design and heatsink.