Hi guys,

Title pretty much says it all. I'm trying to put together a new build and trying to decide if the Extreme really has anything to offer me over the Formula.

It'll mostly be a gaming machine, but will do some video encoding/converting, mp3 and DVD playback along with web browsing and all the other general stuff.

I'm planning on putting a i7 3930K in there along with 16GB RAM. Either Corsair Vengeance LP or Samsung Green 30nm.

I'm fairly limited on motherboard selection as I'm hoping to put an Xonar soundcard in there along with 2 graphics cards. I'd also like to like to leave a gap between the soundcard and the bottom of the graphics card above it as they'll be using 3rd party coolers with dual fans (taking up the length of the card).

I also considered the Asus P9X79 WS, but this lacks eSATA, which despite me not using, bugs me. I liked the idea of the SSD Caching feature of this board, until I found out the limitations.

The Rampage IV Extreme has the chipset fan, which is apparently quite loud and also has quite a lot of power connections and unnecessary features.
The Rampage IV Formula only has 4 DIMM slots, which currently is all I'm using, but makes upgrading my memory more awkward.

I realise the Formula is a cut-down version of the Extreme, but does it just lack some features or does it's overclocking ability suffer also?
Have I dismissed the P9X79 WS too quickly?
Is there any benefit to getting the Samsung memory with either board in the hope it can overclock nicely?

How good/bad is the SupremeFX III onboard audio on the Formula board?

Does PCI-e 3.0 just work or do you need some sort of hack to enable it?

Thanks.