Introduction

Over the last year or so ASUS has put together what they like to call the elite of elite motherboards which are aimed at gamers and hardcore overclocking enthusiasts. These boards come under the Republic of Gamers or ROG series of boards. Each one of them has a set market, target and chipset. While there is usually only one board per chipset, there are a few exceptions for the X38, X48 and P45 chipsets as these can support DDR2 and DDR3. ASUS goes a few extra steps and gives you the option of a ROG board with either DDR2 or DDR3 support. These can be identified by the Formula or Extreme logos; Formula is DDR2 based and Extreme covers the DDR3 ready boards in the line-up.

So far we have seen both AMD and Intel get ROG boards, but with Intel having more market share and a greater variety of chipsets to its Core 2 platform, there are a lot more ROG Intel based boards than that of AMD.

So far we have looked at a number of the ROG boards for both platforms, and we've been extremely impressed with their features, performance and overclocking. But one thing that is obvious with any board of this calibre is that you're going to be paying through the nose for it.

Today we have one of the latest ROG boards to come from ASUS, this particular board based on the new X48 Express chipset. It packs in as many features as you can possibly imagine, so with little time to spare let's see how it stacks up.